


Mar Profundo

by BetweenTownleys



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fever Dreams, Hannibal administering All The Drugs, Killing Together, M/M, Murder Husbands, Post finale survival convalescence fic, Water metaphors, World Travel, eating people who eat dogs, fancy hotel sex, immobile teacup, monster metaphors, never turn your back on the sea, respect for Will Graham's diminishing heterosexuality, sexy whispering, suit smut, will is in denial
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-04-21 04:00:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4814141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetweenTownleys/pseuds/BetweenTownleys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A shadow from deep beneath the surface of the Atlantic stalks Will after the fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ASADO TERMINADO

**Author's Note:**

  * For [squidnapped](https://archiveofourown.org/users/squidnapped/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”  
> -Herman Melville

  
  
Will Graham awoke to the ghost sensation of fingers in his hair.  
  
 White light poured in through the broad open windows that faced the shore. It bathed him, from toes to curls. How long had he been asleep? It was an impossible question, because he was sure that the answer was both never and forever at once. He had always been here, and yet he had never been here before. Salty ocean air pulled gauzy white curtains in and out of the crisp, clean bedroom windows on slow sultry breaths. Their ghostly outline clarified as he blinked at them. It was hot, extremely so, and maybe midday, though as Will rose through bleary layers of consciousness, fumbling slow fingers out across the sheets to regain self-awareness, he felt with a drunken distant sadness that time had lost it’s meaning. The teacup, precious and fragile and forever in his thoughts, had finally suspended itself perfectly in midair. He knew it had stopped now, hovering in trembling sanctity in the dark garden of his mind. Perhaps this was true death, his first conscious thought whispered. This white, soft heat. The kind of heat that flushed the body in a light glaze of sweat. Heat that slowly eroded away at perceptions of logic and structure. The kind of death that held the spinning cup still. If it was midday, it had been midday for years. It would be midday for longer than that.  
  
With a hitched groan, Will pushed himself up into a sitting position. The callused tips of his fingers ghosted to his shoulder, still wrapped tightly in clean white linen strips as it had been the last time he had managed to rise out of the black water of sleep for a few horrifying minutes. He knew indirectly that it must have happened, though all he recalled now was the touch of hands on his face and shoulders, and the sharp salty burn of sea water in his lungs and in his head.  
  
Will’s face ached. A touch to his cheek revealed a row of tidy stitches, and another meticulous stitch holding fast together the split surface of his tongue. Talking would prove difficult for a while, the logical thought cut in. Though, as Will blearily breathed ocean air in and out in slow, controlled pulls, he imagined that speaking words aloud would most likely only make his situation more difficult. Whatever this situation was. Graham looked at his hands, dropped them into his lap on top of the strange pair of white cotton briefs he wore, recognizing nothing familiar.  Dully, he thought that his words had lost all their meaning. Dead people didn’t speak. Not english, nor any other language. They spoke in silent whispers, in vibrations hidden tucked behind the skull. They were invisible fingers tickling his ribs from the inside. Will’s own fingers curled into loose fists, a subconscious attempt to keep their shaking from spreading up his arms. His eyes closed, and he let the sound of the tide hitting the hot shore and the sharp call of sea birds pull him away from himself. Despair washed in, black and inky, to cut through the blinding white sunshine. Then it rushed back again, out into the horizonless sea.  
  
…How… had they survived?  
  
The question reverberated, growing in strength and surety as consistently as the sound of the breaking waves. Will began to tremble again despite his best efforts, and he allowed the memories to wash up over his head.  
  
There had been the impossible impact. There had been the hard thunderclap of hitting the sharp surface of the black atlantic. There was the jerk of pain as the warm body flush against his own was pulled away in the tides, pushed out and down and upside-down and backwards and invisible and everywhere at once, full of salt that burned Will like swallowed tears and a fist at his throat. He thought he had seen something then, beneath the water. Some beautiful and broad expanse of shadow that had reached out to curl around his ankles. The rest vanished, lost to the foamy ripping waves.  
  
Now, with the hushed hum of sweet hot summer rushing around him, there could be no doubt that they had both survived that perilous fall. As Will climbed from the single bed he had laid comatose in for G-d only knew how long, the physical sensation of pain cut sharply through his fog in bright strokes. He ached. And he was very thirsty, though any thought of food brought only a distant and disinterested sense of nausea. Will imagined that if they had truly died, his pain, or perhaps even his pleasure, would have been greater tilted in one direction. Now, as he stumbled barefooted across the smooth, sanded floor of an unknown residence, his body’s own human demands helped solidify his continuing mortality.      
  
     Will saw Hannibal standing on the shore a great distance away. Even from that far, his countenance was instantly recognizable. Will leaned hard on the open door frame that lead out to the empty beach, one bare foot touching the silky cool sand that had blown across the wooden deck. Hannibal was dressed in white linen, casual and elegant as hot wind pulled the cloth around his solid mass.  Even his utilitarian haircut, a jab no doubt from Alana during Hannibal’s extended incarceration, took on a refined quality in the rush of ocean air. He seemed oddly at home there, as if he had been standing ponderously in the tides for years, his expressionless face matching perfectly with the strength of the unknowable horizon. He seemed once again complete, godlike, and yet with a quiet bittersweet melody underlying his visage, a dignified pillar of salt. When something nameless drifted down the shore to whisper in his ear, he turned his skull-like face towards the house and they regarded each other there for long moments, neither smiling nor moving.  
  
  
Lazy clouds rolled in from a distantly dispelling storm as they met at the crest of the dune by the little house. Will shook despite the heat, the hot sun sliding behind him and across his bare back. Hannibal, adversely, stood in complete stillness. Will’s shadow cast a dark blue cutout across the white cloth of Hannibal’s figure, partially obscuring a portion of the Lithuanian’s face. With the regard of someone believing to have just seen a ghost, Graham allowed himself to openly examine his suicide contract. His eyes tremulously tracked up and down Hannibal’s body, taking in his few fresh bruises, the certain stiffness to his posture on one side, and the satiated expression Will had come to associate with being Seen. Was there forgiveness there? Hannibal’s passive eyes took in Will as well, examining every crevice in measured care. When Hannibal smiled slightly, a moan slipped up and burnt the stitch in Will’s tongue. He let the sea wind take the sound away. His left fist went out, haltingly at first, and then painstakingly, to wring into the loose cotton of Hannibal’s shirt. He clung to it, bending towards it, twisting it to ensure the solidity of the body beneath him, and stared at the sand dune at their feet with an unquantifiable relief. Hannibal said nothing, and let Will wring stitches out of the cloth. The distant call of cranes in the dune accompanied their return to the house, shoulder to shoulder.    
  
  
  
——————

 

  
When Will didn’t sleep, and when he was often alone, he spent his time wondering at the preponderance of books of poetry to be found scattered throughout the little house by the sea. Some were old, their leather binding gritty as they eroded in his palms. Other books were fresh and new and crisp, like a paper cut. A few books were fiction novels, here and there, but something about Hannibal’s aesthetic snobbery bent itself very purposefully to the simple beauty of a stack of classic poetry. Of course, Will found himself thinking sometimes in the midst of his extended silence, with only the sound of the water to hold his senses together, of course Hannibal only read the good kind of poetry. Not the 18th century’s florid purple shakespearean envy, or the obnoxiously politicized beat poetry of the 70s Will had chanted his fair share of across college campuses years ago, but a richer, darker stuff. Musings on death and love and thunderstorms. Conrad Aiken, and Pablo Neruda, Edward Thomas, and others whose words poured rich like music from the pages of dry paper.    
  
  
_‘I’m the crow the hawks chase from their nests._  
_I used to think Love would protect us from the shadows_  
_we cast. I used to think that Hope was not what_  
_jingled in our pockets. I used to think all this loneliness_  
_would be unbearable. Now each word is a betrayal,_  
_is the frayed rope-end of desire. Everything I say is_  
_like some cargo hidden in the hold of a sunken ship._  
_In the end we all learn there’s no sea, no sky, no word_  
_big enough to hold all our pain. Only this kiss. Only_  
_Love’s dragline already hooking the very thing it fears.’_  
  
  
Occasionally, Will came across marked pages. Never a turned down corner, but always an elegant bookmark. Never extravagant, but always simple and dignified. Will supposed it was Hannibal’s own way of entertaining Will, in it’s own right. The house was empty of most modern conveniences. No television, no phone, no radio to light a potential path of escape, or to illuminate where exactly in the world they might be located.  There were no musical instruments in the house either, which was an anomaly Will meditated carefully over. No theremin. No harpsichord. No piano.  
  
Only a pointed paragraph, and a thoughtful silence.

 

 

  
—————  
  
  
  
  
  Hannibal prepared a simple tapa of cojonudos for dinner, quietly having set the table as the first shocks of pink stretched luxuriously out across the clear sky. He set the plate neatly in front of Will, giving the china a gentle twist as best to present the flourish of beet greens that streamed like a tail from beneath the immaculate arrangement of quail eggs and soft baguette. His precise movements brought him in careful proximity of his company, and as he poured a crisp and pungent husked tomatillo salsa verde in a careful ring around the dish, his chest brushed close to Will’s shoulder. The slight contact pulled a flinch out of Graham, who until that moment had been sitting in tense stillness. Will looked away mutely, leaning marginally back from the heat of Hannibal’s body. Hannibal lingered for a moment in place, before silently returning to his full height and stepping slowly back around to the other side of the table.  
  
With a soft pop, Lecter uncorked a bottle of crisp white wine. He collected the first glass by the stem, carefully bringing the lip of the bottle to the rim. The sound of the wine as it slid into the glass was both subtle and deafening.  
  
“Tell me, Will…” Hannibal’s voice after days of silence felt like a caress. From his seat, Will shuddered, looked at the table, looked at Hannibal, looked away, already adrift in the water of his own mind.  
  
 “…Do you find our existence here to be that profoundly upsetting? …Judging by the height of the fall and the depth of the water, did you assume that we would both be taken away?”  
  
 The Lithuanian gently reached over the table to place the icy glass in front of Will, who promptly took it up, before returning to fill his own glass. He let his question hang for a beat before continuing.  
  
“One might infer from the height of the fall and the depth of the water, that a sure bet couldn’t entirely be bought from that arrangement. One might think…. that your heart, perhaps, was not entirely… ‘in it to win it’, as they say.”  
  
Will’s eyes returned to his companion, and rested there. His gaze hung trembling on Hannibal as the stitch in his tongue stung him. He didn’t speak, but took a sip of his wine, flinching as the acid burned the lacerations in his mouth. The glass went down again, and Will grabbed his napkin to wring it quietly in his lap.  
  
Hannibal had dressed them for the meal with a subtly irrefutable firmness. He stood now in a smoke gray dinner jacket and a crisp white button-down. No tie, but the first two buttons hung undone to allow a bit of collarbone and mossy chest hair to peek past the clean cloth. He finished the look with black slacks, and had dressed Will in a similar fashion. He had laid the outfit out on the end of Will’s bed in silent insistence, then left to prepare their meal. Will wore charcoal gray, and a lightweight black vest that made him look for once perhaps like he hadn’t single-handedly sponsored a full season of the new LL Bean catalog. Will had haltingly accepted the clothes, only to put them on after looking at them for long minutes, slid the shirt over his head and ran his fingers up the buttons without looking in a mirror after.  
  
Now, through the hazy candle-lit atmosphere of the dinner table, they looked like shadows of shadows, echoing reflections each of the other. Hannibal quirked his head to the side like an inquisitive vulture, examining Will’s expression, before turning again to the wine. He efficiently conceded himself a large but not immodest glass, and sat with a sweep of the jacket down into his seat.  
  
“…were you?” He asked again, his hands moving to the salsa verde. He looked away as he poured a portion onto his own notably vegetarian fare, though his countenance suggested Will had his full attention. Hannibal quietly completed the task and set the dish down with a return flicker of his gaze. “… in it?”  
  
The question was surprisingly direct. Had he, truly, meant to kill them? He thought that he had. Will reeled under the weight of his own truth, and dwelling on his answer brought his lips together into a tight purse, and set his arms to shaking as if induced by a diabetic fit. A fine mist of sweat sprung up beneath his curly fringe, ever so much wilder and bolder now after the mistreatment of a few days of salty wind. He thought of Abigail, sitting alone with him in the norman chapel in Palermo. _‘Where would we have gone?’_ he’d whispered. She had smiled sweetly at him then, smiled in the way he had always wished she would have in life, with complete acceptance and love.  
  
_’In some other world?’_  
  
 Is that what this was, now? Here? Some other world? Will’s pinched face crumpled further into pain, his gaze lost in the unforeseeable distance. He picked his wine glass up again as a salty tear slid down his cheek.  A drop of ocean water expelling itself back out of his body.  
  
“…Will?” Hannibal’s prompt was gentle, almost a whisper.  
  
Haltingly, Will Graham shook his head in response.  Awkwardly at first, and then with more surety, more speed.  She shook his head ‘no’, and looked up again to smile at Hannibal,  moisture collecting at the corners of his mouth.  
  
For long moments Hannibal stared back, his food and wine forgotten as his attention fully focused on the other man. Tension bloomed between them, and when Hannibal gave the most minute smile in return, Will cut loose a desperate breathy exhalation of laughter. Hannibal’s smile stretched a little wider in a way that didn’t quite touch his eyes, and reached again for his wine glass.    
  
They ate the rest of their dinner in silence.    
  


 

  
————  
  


 

  
It was dark when Will woke again. He swam to the surface in a far away evasion of black tentacles, and opened his eyes to the sound of a baseball bat crack lingering in his ears. The cheering crowd faded rapidly into the distance, Molly's heartfelt cadence of laughter rushing back with the receding tide. Ocean waves calmly overtook him, and Will laid for a while in stillness, letting his eyes trace the blue shadows of the ceiling of his lonely bedroom. Sweat trickled down his neck and settled just beneath his hairline.  
  
Hannibal was still awake. He was sitting up in the living room, with an empty wine glass hanging limply from his fingers. He seemed to smell Will before he saw him, taking an extra moment out of his ordinary pattern to recognize the other man's presence. He had shut all the lights off in seeming preparation for sleep, and Will was forced to squint through the dark to see Hannibal as he turned slightly in his seat on the sofa.     
  
"...Will." His voice sounded slightly foggy, as if he had also just climbed up from a deep reverie. Will paused at the entrance of the room to look at him.  
  
"...Is something the matter?"  
  
A somewhat laughable question. Will half huffed a dry smile, without any true humor in it. He let his eyes linger on the empty wine bottle set on the coffee table in front of Hannibal, before wishing he hadn't noticed it. A hand went up to brush across his stubbly face, wiping the sleep away. He was long overdue for a shave. Privately, Will was thankful Hannibal hadn't taken the liberty to do so while Will had been unconscious.   
  
"...It's...." Will stuttered, with some difficulty. "... _hot_."  
  
Hannibal regarded him in the dark for a long moment. Longer. The moment dragged out, until with very controlled and precise effort, Hannibal set his empty glass down on the table with a clear clink. He rose on steady legs and brushed his suit jacket out, once, twice, then buttoned it.  
  
"Perhaps a little fresh air might clear your head? Might you care to join me out on the deck?" He looked back at Will with a pointed dismissal of his previous fog. "...to have a look... at the moonlight? A full moon, tonight, I believe."  
  
Regarding the invitation with full knowledge of Hannibal's somewhat heavy handed reference point, Will lingered a moment before offering a curt nod.  
  
Despite all the open windows in the house, outside was indeed much, much cooler. The moon was quite full as well, and offered a strange glow to the white shore, casting the distant sand in hues of vibrant purple and blue. The sky glittered with thousands of stars. More stars even than from the remote dark skyline of Wolf Trap, Virginia. Not for the last time, Graham wondered where exactly Hannibal had taken them, and how long he expected them to remain here. His nautical knowledge of star navigation placed them somewhere in South America, but at this point, his guess was as good as any. With the decision that time had a much lesser significant meaning than ever before, Will half wondered if he would hate it so much to linger continuously in this place. In a way, it would be a fitting purgatory for them. It was, at the very least, peaceful.  
  
Will walked in docile circles on the deck with his eyes half-lidded, enjoying the wicking cool sensation of the wind drying the sweat from his brow. Hannibal stood back a few steps, not quite leaning on the wooden railing, but also not far off from it either. He regarded Will with an expression lost somewhere between thirsty frustration and nothing at all, and when Will caught it out of the corner of his eye he turned away to dig his toes in the fine layer of sand settled on the cool wood.  
  
"You remember what I said to you." Hannibal's sudden emphatic statement left no room for disagreement. Will's step paused, and he turned to look back at Hannibal over a rumpled shoulder.  
  
"About what I wanted for you. For us."  
  
A hard lump gathered in Will's throat and washed his face blank of all expression. 'See?'  _See?  See?_ Garret Jacob Hobbs echoed a thousand times in his mind, overlapping and merging with Hannibal's own appeal. See? _'See? This is what I've always wanted for you. For the both of us.'_  
  
Hannibal stepped away from the railing, immediately triggering Will's breath to pick up in pace. He watched Hannibal with cautious concern as the taller man moved closer, closer. Soon, he stood at Will's shoulder, both hands tucked elegantly in his pockets as he looked down the curve of his nose at Will with pointed intensity.  
  
"...You remember. And... you remember that other bit, don't you?" Hannibal's breath smelled of a rich Côtes du Rhône. "What came after? My, my. What a clever boy. You had me. My clever boy."  
  
Will attempted to swallow the lump, and failed. "...Am I… yours?" He refused to let his eyes drop, meeting Hannibal with defense. "...Or... are you mine?"  
  
The look Will received in response was blistered. It glowed like a hot coal, an anger which existed on a different plane from mortal men. It recalled a wrathful first testament, and then it was slowly mopped away by something softer, and infinitely more pained. Hannibal lingered on his next words, his thin lips parting in preparation to spit venom. He was silent.  
  
Even in the dark, there was still moonlight enough to illuminate the contours of Hannibal's wide cheekbones. That same light sunk the shadows of his eye sockets deep into the back of his skull, turning his eyes into mere glittering pinpoints from within two dark voids. Will shuddered, sweat breaking fresh again out across his neck.  
  
"I love you, Will."  
  
"Like a… god loves…. his creation?" Graham half laughed, leaning back as Hannibal leaned closer.  
  
“Does the butterfly consider it’s own demise? It seeks only only to produce more butterflies like itself, and to feel the freedom of the wind.”  
  
“You’re the spider.”  
  
That seemed to sting, and Hannibal's face grew cold and hot simultaneously. He didn't reply, but looked more closely at Will's face, examining his crevices in the dark.  
  
The truth hung between them. It bled out on the pale wood of the deck.

 

  
  
—————————  
  


 

  
  
Will woke to the sound of the front door clicking shut. He rose up on a groggy elbow from where he had lain himself across the couch, a dry hand rising to wipe the sleep from his eyes. He was beginning to shirk the task of wondering at the time, and now dwelled only a little on it as he cast his blurry vision around for where Hannibal must be. It was raining now, the fierce staccato on the roof told him. It had been several days, or maybe several hours, since their conversation under the pale moonlight, and the shadow of cloud and thunder did much to obscure the true time of day. Perhaps midday. Maybe midnight again. Maybe all of this had been nothing more than an understated parade of different midnights.  
  
Hannibal came around the corner into the living room after a prolonged shuffle with what sounded like an umbrella. When he came into Will’s range of vision, he had a large stack of what appeared to be suits, all individually zipped in it’s own travel bag. He swept a careful hand across the plastic lining of the top suit before gently laying them all over the arm of a chair close by. When he turned clear eyes on Will where he lay, Will had the distinct sensation that Hannibal was seeing through him. He squirmed uncomfortably under the scrutiny, still sleepy-eyed, his hair an unruly muss of salt-tousled curls.  
  
“…How long have I been asleep?” Graham muttered, feeling dopey, watching himself from a safe distance as his mind made a connection, and then became afraid of the hot prick of a needle he couldn’t remember. The fear passed quickly, replaced only by a foggy and distant confusion.  
  
“Several hours. High time to wake up, I should think.”  
  
In a few long strides, Hannibal closed the gap between them to bat Will’s hand away and replace it with his own in a bold intimacy. Lecter’s hands were cool and dry, and Will could feel his own pulse fluttering like a dying bird in irregular rhythms against the wandering fingers. Hannibal pushed Will’s bangs back from his face, ran a careful caress down and around his jaw, pulled the delicate purple flesh beneath his eyes down to peer closer at his pupils. Seeming satisfied with what he saw, he stood straight again, looked Will over a moment longer, and turned back to his afternoon’s acquisitions. Will wondered, in a faraway manner, why his face seemed to ache when Hannibal’s calm hands went away from his skin.  
  
“There is a port, not terribly far from here. The ferry departs to and from our little paradise only a few times a week, and so I took the liberty this evening to run a few much needed errands.” He glanced across their distance. “You haven’t showered in days, Will.”  
  
Blinking placidly from his inexplicable full body lounge, Will contemplated the words. His body felt heavy, like it was filled to the brim with gritty sand. He sighed instead of replying, his eyes skating the distant peek of ocean he could see roiling darkly through the window. Hannibal was quiet for another long moment, before he took a sharp intake of breath and turned neatly on his heel. His arm was looping behind Will’s back and prying him from the sofa before Will was fully conscious of the action, and not for the first (or, decidedly, last) time, Will found himself pressed close against Hannibal’s body without giving proper consent. A look of muted pain passed over his face like shadows over water before he was forced to simply accept his new condition.  
  
The bathroom was palatial in comparison to the rest of the house. Twin grey marble sinks stood as accents to the cold white-tiled shower. The shower itself stood spacious and open behind a sliding glass panel, and the the floor was artfully decorated with interconnecting stones that seemed to subtly compliment the smoothed over ocean pebbles Will ran across his fingers during his directionless walks on the beach. He let Hannibal set him against the counter, and peered docilely at the Lithuanian as he set about turning the water to an acceptable temperature.  
  
A dark thought came unbidden, rising up through the sluggish layers of Will’s consciousness. It came thick and burbling, like sinister oil, seeping up from deep within the earth. He let it settle and pool at the top of his thoughts, and he watched Hannibal’s back flex for a while as he adjusted the shower nozzle.  
  
“…Why… ha… h-haven’t you… kissed me?”    
  
Typically, the bold statement passed Hannibal by as if it were a dry remark on the dreary weather. Will was forced to swallow his beating heart back into his ribcage, though his sweaty fingers did curl around the counter ledge behind him as the silence drew out. Hannibal had certainly given himself ample opportunity to make a nefarious move, if he had ever indeed wished to do so. Will actively chose to ignore the danger of his unnaturally long periods of sleep. The only thing that kept Will from fearing that something of that nature HAD ALREADY occurred was somehow paradoxically simple; Hannibal would consider it rude. Will was unsure how he knew Hannibal would think it so, this from the man who cooked and ate people, this from the man who had strapped Will once to a chair and took a bone saw to his forehead, this from the man who force-fed him an ear, but there was a certain horrific crassness to sexual harassment that did not match up with Hannibal’s aesthetic. So much that, if it weren’t for his devastating interludes with Alanna Bloom, Will would have been unsure if Hannibal even placed anywhere on the active sexual spectrum at all. And yet, everything about their friendship, their… situation… had been different, unique, from the very beginning. Will tried to recall those earlier memories through what he now recognized as a sedative fog. The standing man continued to fiddle with the nozzle settings for a while longer, until with careful hands he retracted himself from the door of the running shower and turned to give Will a clinical look.  
  
“…Should I have kissed you?”  
  
The response, cool and collected, left Will feeling unexpectedly cold. He opened his mouth to reply, but finding no words on his tongue for the moment, closed it again. He looked darkly down at the ground, and felt the sharp cut of the marble counter digging into his hip. He thought of Molly’s hot slickness in the dark, and it made his throat dry.  
  
Across the room, Hannibal carried on almost as if he hadn’t heard the question. He moved to the delicate wooden cabinet and pulled from within it a stack of sinfully soft white towels. The door closed with a satisfying magnetic clack and he proceeded back across the room to set them on the counter by Will’s hip. Without missing a beat, he moved to the buttons of Will’s shirt, undoing them with great care each from the top. Whenever his fingertips brushed Will’s chest in the slightest, the smaller man flinched.  
  
Hannibal regarded Will’s downturned face with mild fascination, as if staring at a peculiar bug doing something against it’s nature.  
  
“Would you like me to?”  
  
The question seized Will’s shoulders, rendering him stiff and terrified from his hard lean on the counter. His breath came quicker, and across from him, Hannibal gently inhaled a new aroma like rich fertile dirt, and sour salt. A succession of conflicted expressions rippled across Will’s face as he considered his faraway family, and how they somehow came last in this moment, in this caravan of other black thunderstorms. Molly’s voice was in his head, laughing low and sensually. Her fingers slid past his tightening waistband, sucking the air out of Will’s lungs. Was she safe now? Did she hate him? How could she not? Like a marionette, Will awkwardly shook his head ‘no’, unable to meet Hannibal’s gaze. His smell sweetened as Hannibal’s fingers brushed his stomach with the release of the final button.  
  
“You would not like me to kiss you?”  
  
Will shook his head ‘no’ more vigorously, still too ashamed to pull his eyes level.    
  
The floor was interesting, Will kept finding. He had spent a tremendous amount of time staring at the floor of this house so far. It was an old habit he was comfortable with keeping, even in this negative image of the life he once lived. The grout between the tiles was extremely white. Whiter than any bathroom grout Will had scrubbed furiously away at with a toothbrush and a can of powdered COMET. Dogs had a way of making everything in a house dirty. Not filthy, per say, but they distributed a healthy even layer of grime across all surfaces of a house. Small price to pay for endless faith and boundless love. With eyes on the ground, it was impossible to catch the imperceptible twitch to Hannibal’s jaw as his hands moved further south. Will’s eyes snapped up wide with shock moments later when those same fingers grasped the fly of his pants. Hannibal popped the top button authoritatively, regarding Will’s face with an almost scientific interest, before sliding the zipper carefully down.    
  
“-D-don’t-!” Will’s breath caught in his throat.  
  
“You are safe here, do not distress.” A twinge of something sadistic seemed to flash across Hannibal’s face, and then was gone again, only a shadow of cruelty, lingering in the twitch of his lips as he slid a cool thumb across the scar on Will’s stomach. The sweep caused the scar flesh to tighten, and Graham released a haggard breath. Sweat clung to his flesh like dew.  
   
Condensation collected on the glass wall of the shower, fat warm drops rolling down the length only to be replaced by others. For a moment, Hannibal was nothing more than a dark shadow against the dripping white wall, and the sound of breath lost itself in the rush of water.    
  
“I believe you can manage the rest.” Hannibal murmured darkly, before calmly removing his hands. And then, removing his entire person. He strode gracefully out through the bathroom door without looking back once, leaving Will to tremble in the gathering steam.  
  
  


 

 

 


	2. PERRO SALADO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal tests the waters.

  
  
  
When the silty blue hue of his dream tilted sideways, Alana was there. She was naked, beguiling and lovely in a way Will hadn’t ruminated on in years. Even in the dream, he wondered on why it was her, and not Molly, with her mischievous snicker and the itchy tickle of her long yellow hair as it grazed across his scarred abdomen. Alana was an old ache. A sad shadow cast out from the hurt shell of the person Will Graham had once been. She was admonishing looks, and bittersweet support, and the clinical sting of diagnoses too close for comfort. Maybe it was drifting in the Atlantic that had finally collected Will’s emotional state and his physical state into a singular murderous unity. Maybe it was his instinctual clutch for support at the threat of drowning that brought her to the overflowing center of his mind.  But she was there. And her imagined hands on his body brought with them the return of an ancient pang of longing.  
  
They were in his house. His little boat of a house back in Wolf Trap, floating lost in the dark woods below a sea of stars.  Her hair was clean and soft against the bristle of Will’s chin, her pliant hands pushing beneath the rough cable knit of his sweater. She scratched infuriating patterns of sticky warmth, her nails carefully clipped, down, down, down. Will threw his arms back on either  side of the mantle piece and rolled his head against the shelf as her hands slid beneath his waistband. The howling of wild dogs wracked the house from the outside, shaking the delicate glass of the windows.  
  
_‘You look flushed.’_ the inky liquid silhouette of Alana whispered. She knelt on a slow knee, pooling like oil around Will’s waist, her cheek pressed against his throbbing heat. _‘Have you been yelling?’_  
  
Will sighed. “Screaming, more like it.”  
  
_‘Guess you dodged a bullet with me.’_ her voice deepened, lowered, became a rough, warm whisper against the head of his cock.    
  
Beyond the glassy blackness of his windows, something enormous moved through the woods. Trees groaned and cracked, as if the hooves of some gigantic creature moved in vast tracks overhead.  
  
The tendons of Will’s hands snapped as they tightened into fists. “I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet. I feel… wounded.”  
  
Blood filled his mouth. His cheek was bleeding again. Or, was it his shoulder? Will glanced down at the growing red stains which blossomed like perfect impatiens across his sweater. His stomach, exposed by Alana’s insistent fingers, slid open and dumped his intestines out across her arms.  
  
_‘Are you going to try to hurt Hannibal again?’_ Black water rushed in beneath the cracks in the door, filling the room rapidly. Alana’s inky hair ran in rivulets down the delicate white arc of her neck. _‘Is he safe?’_  
  
When she took him in her mouth, a gut-searing groan cut it’s way loose from the pit of Will’s stomach, leaving him panting, parched.  
  
“ _From_ me?” He laughed, breathless, giddy, blood running into his eyes as water rushed in around his knees. It rose rapidly to give a cool kiss to his exposed perineum.  
  
 “…or _for you_?”    
  
The creature was directly above them. It was coming for them, it was here. It was too late, hard black death hovered over them, merciless. Will’s head lolled against the mantle, his eyes slipping shut. Water mixed with blood mixed with semen, pouring down his throat and filling his lungs.

 _He couldn't breathe. It was there. When it came, the beast smashed irrevocably down, shattering through the roof as if it were made of nothing but glass and paper. It crushed everything beneath in a mutilated crunch of timber and glass and flesh, before raising it’s black antlers high into the stars._  
  
  


  
Thousands of miles away, Will Graham woke with a startled jerk in the salty dark.

  
  
  
  
For long minutes, the only sound Will processed was the terrified staccato of his hammering heart. It deafened his ears and filled his head with a pressured throb that made it impossible to think, to move, to do anything other than clutch at his sheets and wait for the sweat and fear to roll back again.  His own haggard breathing consumed him, as slowly, slowly, the dream receded into the murky distance. Slowly, slowly, Will’s fingers un-clenched from where he had fisted balls of his sheets into an impossible snarl. Slowly, his heart beat settled, and his lungs resumed their ordinary shape, and the adrenaline seeped out again from his muscles, leaving him sweat-drenched and spent in the thick night air.  
  
He was, however, he noted with a somewhat hysterical exhaustion, inexplicably, impossibly hard.  
  
Damp curls flat against his pillow, Will tossed his head in feckless turns. He blinked rapidly into the dark, both infuriated by his body’s response and, also distantly, almost welcoming. It had admittedly been some time since he had tended to his own desires. If he considered himself to now be living a second life, somewhere between time and space, he hadn’t yet been able to welcome into that scenario the demands of his own body. Guilt wracked him, pulling him in every direction. Will had a sudden, painful jolt of homesickness then, for the solitude of his warm little house back in Wolf Trap. He thought sadly of how it was dark there now, closed up and unoccupied, empty of all the creature comforts Will had filled it with over the years, never to rise up against the soles of his feet again. He thought of sitting in his arm chair with two fingers of bourbon, dogs warm at his knees.  He thought of the intimate privacy, and an electric rush slid up his legs.  
  
Only hesitant for another moment, Will finally succumbed and slid his hand beneath his boxers. Her took his length in a broad grip, reveling in the rough brush of his knuckles. He squeezed, released, slid his hand down to the base of his cock and wrung it up again, root to tip. Alana returned to him, the strange eroticism of his nightmare still hidden in the dark. He thought of how he had wanted her, and how she had always been a step out of his reach. He had wanted for her to embrace him. To hold his leaking mind together. He had wanted to roll himself up in her arms, to lose himself in her comfort. He thought about her lips on his, so fevered and passionate Will thought she might leak sweet juice all over him like a rotten fruit if he squeezed her too hard. His hand quickened in pace, a moan sliding past his chapped lips. He was inside of her. She consumed him, enveloping him and sucking him in ever deeper, dribbling odoriferous rivulets down her thighs in a sticky mess.  
  
When Will came, only a few minutes later, he had shifted to his side. His come striped the edge of the bed in two tidy shots, and he looked dully at it, opalescent even in the dark. His body felt heavy, tired, old. He closed his eyes, and soon drifted back into a feckless sleep, the sound of howling dogs following his decent beneath the surface.

 

  
  
—————

 

  
Hannibal’s watchful eye was never far off. As his body recovered, Will spent progressively longer and longer periods sitting out on the empty beach. He was growing to like the hypnotic rush of the waves. The steady cadence became reassuring, like a warm heartbeat beneath the sleeping ear. The waves spoke words for him Will no longer felt he could communicate himself, and he meditated on their suicide as he ran hot sand through his fingers. Hannibal meditated in turn on the shape of Will’s body propped up against the green horizon. So much of their communication had been nonverbal in the past, but the sound of the waves now rushed up louder than ever between them, sucking away what little dialogue they shared. It slid their minds deep down into the ancient depths of the ocean, where sharks meandered in sinister circles.  
  
Will’s body recovered. The sand polished his skin soft and smooth, and the sun glazed his shoulders a warm brown. Hannibal curiously watched him, and Will watched the horizon as he waited patiently by the sea to die.    


 

  
——————  


 

  
On an especially sunny day, it was declared that Will’s cheek had healed neatly. Hannibal clipped the stitches and removed them that afternoon with sanitized tweezers, each piece set with precision onto a small silver dish placed on a living room side table. When they were gone, and the skin swabbed, Will raised his fingers to touch the ribbed skin. There would be a scar. An ugly one. That much he could be sure, if only by the inquisitive caress of Will’s own hand. Hannibal watched Will’s eyes go distant as he touched the mark. There were no mirrors in the house, save for the one in Hannibal’s often locked bedroom.  
  
“Would you like me to fix your hair for you, Will?” Hannibal asked briskly, a casual airiness to his attitude which complimented the sun pouring in through the skylight.  
  
From his chair, Will glanced up at Hannibal, his fingers slowly falling away from the ugly scar across his cheek and back down into his lap. He seemed to seriously consider the question, before giving a slow nod. Hannibal smiled, and turned to fetch his supplies.  
  
Salt wind had turned Will Graham’s already tousled head of curls into a riot of blue-black brambles. Hannibal stood behind him and ran his fingers deep into the mass, scratching the scalp he found there in invigorating circles, and shaking loose the heady scents of natural oil and salt stink and fragrant shampoo. Will was stiff at first, but soon leaned into the touch, very much like an old and tired dog having lost it's fight, finally turning towards it’s master’s hand. He let Hannibal push his head in circles, bending easily with the direction of pressure. When the comb first touched the top of his hairline by another sinister scar, Will’s eyes fluttered shut. He sighed contentedly as Hannibal combed his curls back into orderly plaits.  
  
“I’ve arranged for a water taxi to take us to the ferry this evening.” Hannibal casually announced. Beneath his hands, Will’s eyes opened again, though he held perfectly still.  
  
“There is a certain _choripan_ vendor not terribly far from here which I sampled from in my travels as a young man. I wish to…experience a re-connection with them. I’ve set clothes out for you which you will find yourself quite amenable to.”  
  
Will held his breath for a long moment, wishing not to dislodge Hannibal’s divulging attitude. And yet, he hovered on the edge of his question, wanting at once to protect the sanctity of their little drifting, unknown paradise. Any more information and the cup would begin to spin again. It would twist and turn in progressively more volatile patterns. They would be resurrected, and the timeless quiet heat of their convalescence would be suddenly and abruptly ended. Will worried nervously on his lip, releasing a bitter aroma into the air.    
  
Hannibal’s hands were steady, and reassuring. The comb swept cleanly to the right, molding Will’s wild curls into a manicured quaff. “…You’ve been playing games alone in the dark, Will. Do you intend to drown yourself in the ocean you spend so much time dwelling on?” He paused a beat. “…again?”  
  
“Not without you.” The response came automatically, unbidden, hard-wired.     
  
Hannibal huffed affably, a half-smile lingering on his lips. He let his hand drag smooth knuckles down Will’s scarred cheek in a loving caress. For a few seconds, he allowed Will the gentle touch of the pads of his fingers. They grazed lazily along the exposed jugular of his throat. Beneath the touch, Will involuntarily shuddered.  
  
“What a rousing notion. May I consider that a promise?”  
  
“You can consider it whatever you like, Doctor.” Will monotoned, staring dead ahead. “I reckon it’s a hard fact now that wherever you go, I go.”  
  
 Hannibal’s smile grew.  “Quite.”  
  
As Hannibal’s fingers coiled strands of his hair in twining circles, Will wondered distantly when the other man’s touch had stopped being so threatening. He thought of Hannibal’s hands unbuttoning his pants with a dull jolt, recalling how it had frightened him in a way blood running hot across his arms never had. He wondered where they stood. What Hannibal saw, what he felt, what he was currently scheming, none of it seemed clear. What was his endgame? The only clarity Will saw was his own position in Lecter’s web. There was no escaping this tangle, and the futility of attempting to do so would only rip Will apart, body and soul. He listened to Hannibal hum contentedly behind him, let his eyes slide shut again, and leaned back into the touch.  


 

  
  
————

 

  
  
Hannibal dressed Will for the evening, sliding him into a crisp white shirt and a black leather jacket soft as the underbelly of a calf. The Lithuanian chose a light black knit sweater for himself. A white dinner jacket offered contrast, paired with a Panama hat which sat just-so atop his short fringe at a classically jaunty angle. The water taxi took them to a long and lonely pier at the far end of the island , where men waited in the dying light for the arrival of the ferry. When it came, Hannibal spoke in hushed Spanish with the captain, slipping something into his hand with a subtle smile before ushering them quickly aboard.  
  
Will paced the deck as the sky grew deeper purple with the receding sun. The wind was growing chilly, and he paused to lay a hand on the railing, thankful for the leather jacket Hannibal had chosen. It was insulating, and hugged him with reassuring pressure across his shoulders. Sea birds flew as flat black silhouettes against the darkening sky, crying halos circling the rusty vessel. He watched them for a while, envious of the gift of flight.  
  
When Hannibal materialized at his side, Will turned towards him with a glib tongue. “So are you _finally_ going to tell me where we are?”  
  
Hannibal gave him a long look, revealing nothing, before quirking his head at an inquisitive angle. His panama hat obscured one of his eyes with the motion, giving him in the fading light the luminous quality of a gaunt black and white film star.

“Have you not accrued enough pieces of evidence to arrive at your own conclusion, Will?”  
  
“Maybe.” Will leaned heavily down on the rail, bracing himself across his forearms as he cast his eyes out over the water. “We’re far south of the prime meridian. The stars here all shine at a drunken angle, like someone took their hand and smeared them sideways across the sky ...Plus, you keep serving _Asado_. I would say Spain if it had more coastal island formations. Are we in Chile? …No, we’re moving north and the shore line is on the left. Argentina?”  
  
The look Hannibal cast the back of Will’s head was slow and loving, the stare of a contented cat.  
  
“Indeed.” His voice warmed with fondness. “The current is directing our course at the moment towards the city of _Comodoro Rivadavia_ in the Patagonian province of Chubut.”  
  
Hannibal leaned down on the railing next to Will, taking the opportunity to press their arms together and push closer with a conspiratorial smile. “The Cathedral in Comodoro is renowned across the world as one of the most exquisite representations of the Neo-Gothic style. It is the seat of the _Diocese De Comodoro Rivadavia_ , and houses the name of the holy man San Huan Bosco, who many years ago founded the noble Salesian Order. The crypt beneath the cathedral is said to be stunningly solemn.”  
  
Will glanced sideways at the other man, a grin tugging at his lips for the first time in days. “And we all know how you just _love_ a good crypt lurk.”  
  
“Is there nothing you find moving by being in the presence of the holy dead?”  
  
Will huffed, half a laugh, half an accusation. “You love saints like people fear the plague. You relish the fact that they died for a thankless god, and that _you’re_ somehow still here. What’s the point of all that _praying_ and _postulating_ if in the end all God wants to do is collapse a roof on a sunday mass? You love their futility. You _revel_ in being near the corpses of the failed.”  
  
“…Is it a sin, Will, to wish to express our truest natures?” The question came quieter, a gentle push of memory. Memories of the night they stood blood-drenched in each other’s arms, high above the roiling Atlantic. Will’s smile dropped with his gaze, and he let his eyes skate out across the water, before they came back to settle on his own hands. He folded his fingers together into an anxious steeple.  
  
Hannibal leaned closer still, until the brim of his hat tickled the curls above Will’s ear. His words were nothing more than breath in the purple dark, almost lost entirely in the ferry wind. “Would you not offer me your hand again if we stood together experiencing our true natures? Would you not wish any longer to stay by my side? …I would never part from you, Will.”  
  
Beneath the glittering black glass their ferry cut through, Will thought he caught a glimpse of the shadow he had seen after their fall. Something luxurious and vast uncoiled beneath the ferry’s hull, flexed, stretched, and reached up towards the surface like an ink stain bleeding tendrils out in every direction. Will smiled sadly, and pulled his fingers apart, only to reach over and take Hannibal’s hand in his own. He could tell the gesture took Hannibal by surprise, because there was a stunned quality of silence that lingered as Will gazed at the water. But when Hannibal’s fingers interlaced with his own and curled firmly up around his knuckles, he knew they were in agreement.  
  
When Will finally looked up again at Hannibal, who was a warm and rumbling shadow at his side, he let a smile slide sincerely across his face. When Hannibal smiled knowingly back, Will sighed contentedly, feeling with poignancy the last of his old life die, slipping lifelessly underneath their vessel and becoming lost in the dark.   
  
"Didn't I tell you it's beautiful?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm enjoying writing these little shortie chapters! this chapter's title "perro salado" is a cocktail called the salty dog made with gin, lime and grapefruit. It's tangy construction leaves a puckered taste in your mouth, but shit will also fuck you up with that high gin content, so I thought the tone of this chapter should be "I hate this and it fucks me up but i cant make myself stop." IE the unoriginal plot of the entirety of Hannibal?? huh. Plus, you know, mad water metaphors. I will use every dumb liquid metaphor I can think of. Witness Will Graham's soul dying in this chapter, and get ready for things to get creepy and sexy in the next chapter. That is, if Will getting a fever dream BJ from squid ink Alana before being killed by an enormous ravenstag isnt creepy enough for you. I have not yet begun to creep. I will get to that creeptastic BJ. 
> 
> PS everything I wrote/will write about Argentina in this is probably horrendously historically inaccurate? I tried! I did some research! like! kiiiind of? but? I dont really? super care??? because this is a fanfiction? Just go with it? Any inaccuracies pointed out to me will be modified with a shrug.


	3. MARIPOSA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal takes Will into the city to pay an old acquaintance a visit.

 

 

The crowded night market buffeted around Will's shoulders in an angry, ceaseless tide. He had forgotten, in the timeless serenity of the ocean, what so many humans together in one place was like. People spilled out onto the main drag from seemingly every crevice, creeping beneath striped linen curtains and wooden crates stacked high with persimmons, nuts, and chiles of all colors and sizes. Street vendors shouted their wares as they bulldozed through the crowd with their carts, singing customers towards their _arepas_ and _asados._ Children's small hands slid quietly past the pockets of the unwary, dirt crunched beneath thousands of feet, and feral dogs prowled the gutters for discarded animal debris. The smell was overwhelming. It was dark above them in the few glances of night sky that breaks in the intricate webbing of booth and building allowed, but this deep into the city there were no stars. Only floodlights, and footfalls, and the fevered chatter of life from the street wrapping entirely around them.

Will squinted away from the rush and turned his face towards Hannibal, who walked calmly at his side. The Lithuanian was smiling slightly as his gaze swept the horizon, completely at ease, as if the idea of simply vanishing into the crowd brought him a deep and personal serenity. Will recalled that Hannibal said he had visited Chubut before in the days of his youth, so perhaps something in his expression was a little nostalgic too. He had certainly spent enough time waxing poetic about Florcence. Even when feeling the pressure of the crowd, Will couldn't suppress his small smirk at the thought of Hannibal in his early twenties. How he must have glittered then, unseen, unsuspected, with the whole world at his feet not knowing that the devil himself walked among them. That the devil visited museums, and sampled world cuisines at his own leisure, that he preferred the more whimsical and melodramatic Mahler to be performed on the harpsichord, but never ever Debussy.

Will thought that the idea of Hannibal's own loneliness and isolation hadn't yet clarified the direction of his cruelty then. He had been free in a metaphorical sense, not just the obviously literal one, long before they had ever met. What a contrast Will presented to a young Hannibal at that age. Will, who back then had still grasped a tenuous positivity throughout his experience at the police academy. Young Will, who could still laugh about hopping fences with stolen watermelons, and who didn't yet know what a week-old murder scene smelled like, much less what it felt like. Will, who had never liked people, but at least had understood how to be marginally content by being alone.

With no lingering afterthought, Will's smirk died. He knew better now. He knew, again without fanfare, plain and rough and uncompromising, that God was dead. God had been dead for quite some time, and Graham didn't require a pendulum to tell him who had committed that murder. Will's feet dragged slightly as he recalled the sound of his own voice repeatedly expressing the same pompous point to a scandalized Bedelia Du Maurier; ' _If you play, you pay_.' In the end, Will had paid with his life. The thought of Winson sitting on his front porch came to Will, and his slack expression grew sad.

"What is it?"

Hannibal glanced sideways as he navigated them through a patch of black-wimpled nuns and bore them out on the other side of a chorizo caser's stall. Will caught a glance as they passed of a row wooden dowels, all hung heavy with long glistening intestines, their delicate membranes airing out in preparation to be stuffed. They made Will think of Tobias Budge's basement, and who had sent him there.

"Is the crowd becoming a problem for you, Will? I'm here. If you find it helpful, I could take your hand."

"I- I was just… t-thinking about Winston."

For a moment, Hannibal gave Will a longer look, his own step lagging slightly. "…That's what you've been thinking about, all this time. As you sat on the beach, you reflected on loss."

"…Yes." 

"…And?"

The question stalled out in Will's brain. He tried to catch up to the idea, walking more briskly until he and Hannibal moved in sync again, shoulder to shoulder. "…Aaaand?"

"Yes, and then?"

"Wh-…There _isn't_ any more after ' _and_ '." Will snorted. "I had sort of planned it more like a _'The End'._ "

"In perfect honesty, it was much more likely a _'To Be Continued_ ', though personally I would have preferred the admittedly more saccharine ' _Happily Ever Afte_ r'." The psychiatrist glanced fondly at Will from the corner of his eye, as if regarding a stubborn, if not extremely lovable relative. "Perhaps, however, we might save that conversation for dinner. How do you feel about lamb?"

Will blanched. "Is that a trick question?"

"You've always been up to the challenge."

"Lamb would be… acceptable. The four legged variety."

Lecter looked ahead, rolling his shoulders in preparation for what Will recognized by now as the ramp-up to some kind of insidious decision. In preparation for whatever cunning scheme Hannibal had bubbling away in the stew pot of his mind, Will took in a deep, steadying breath. The tip of his tongue ended up gently pinched between his teeth as he waited, walking and looking and waiting for Hannibal like a stray hoping for scraps.

"…Perhaps… pork, then?" The Lithuanian vaguely intoned.

"Again, only if it's the four legged variety. Unless this really _is_ a trick."

A genial huff cut it's way past Hannibal's thin lips, even as his eyes coursed ahead through the thick crowd. Absently, he reached back to slide his fingers through Will's, this time without asking for permission. At first, the gesture was met with a slight stiffness, before the shorter man gave in and gripped Hannibal's hand back.

It was strange to Will, even now, knowing he had been the first to join their hands as they leaned on the railing of the ferry. What did the gesture say that he, somehow, wasn't able to say with words? It was an innocent touch, really. A gesture for children. ( _And lovers_ , another whisper slid in.) It was innocent, and yet… it wasn't. It was somehow strikingly intimate, in a way that confused Will as he threaded his fingers ever more firmly into Hannibal's. Why had he wanted to reach out for that hand? How did it reflect their friendship? Intimacy was a cute word for the utter disregard of boundaries their relationship apparently lacked, and yet something as simple as holding hands still felt volatile. How intimate could such a gesture be, in comparison to the hot cut of a linoleum knife sliding across his bowels? It was both less and more. It was unruly and comforting, like grasping at apron strings that threatened to pull away at any moment. Somehow, that notion was unthinkable. Hannibal's palm was smooth and cool, dry of the nervous sweat which constantly plagued Will's extremities. A pulse of fear that soon the hand would be gone caused Will's fingers to tighten, and without thinking, both men matched their pace in a perfect sync.

Will flicked a concerned glance up past dark eyelashes at Hannibal's calm demeanor. Without needing to see the look, Hannibal still seemed to feel it. His face took on a glib glitter.

"You're going to need to learn to temper your taste to the situation, my good Will. There's someone I'd very much like you to meet."

  
  


—-----------------------

  
  


Hannibal's coat smelled like chimichurri. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was much too close for comfort, in a way Will never seemed to see coming until it was too late, now more a warm shadow in the dark than a man. His arm pulled Will against his chest, which felt uniquely strange, and vaguely unwelcome. And yet despite it all, the smell of the choripan lingered. Spice was an odd thing to notice at this particular moment, and yet despite a terrifying concoction of additional factors, this was what Will noticed first and foremost. Hannibal was, and maybe had always been, the scent of garlic. Not cologne, not blood. Garlic. Strange, and yet not strange at all.

" _You're hurting me."_ Will managed to push the words past his suddenly thick tongue. His insistent whisper was only met with a dismissive shush, though Hannibal's arm wrapped more tightly around Will's shoulders.

Ironic that Hannibal should smell like the very thing that for centuries had been used to push back vassals of the dead. And yet there it was. Will felt himself pushing his sweaty cheek closer to the Lithuanian, bizarrely comforted by the smell as the insanity of this particular moment rushed up around him, filling him up. The smell grew more pungent as he closed in, accentuated with hints of olive oil. After that, red pepper came, then vinegar, and the astringent pinch of finely chopped parsley. The smell wrapped around them, between them, beneath them, seeping into the fiber of their clothes. Briefly, Will was thankful for the smell of the chimichurri. It was far easier focusing on that than it was pondering why he couldn't stop his entire body from trembling.

Will clutched at Hannibal with shaking hands. His hands were bloody past the wrists, and bits of human hair and debris clung to them, like a child's macaroni glue project after being dropped on the ground. Hannibal clutched Will's wrists to his chest with his free hand in an attempt to hold them still, and they pressed quietly together against the weeping brick wall of a dark alley, both in perfect silence. They were hiding. They were hiding, and they were _waiting_. Will knew they hadn't yet fled the scene for a _reason_ by the purposeful angle of Hannibal's jaw, silhouetted sharply against distant street lamps. He was listening for something far in the distance. But their awkward position made it hard for Will to guess at what reason they might still be there for. They hid in a narrow nook back from the main drag of the street, for now accompanied only by the incessant bark of a chained dog as it's distraught howling echoed back down the alley towards them. The body still laid cooling behind the choripan stall only a few yards away, and from his hard lean, Will could still feel the paper parcel wrapped in string that settled warmly in Hannibal's inner pocket.

Blood mixed with garlic in Will's nose, and it took a few shaky seconds before he became acutely aware of just how disturbingly mouthwatering that particular aroma was. His body betrayed his thoughts when his stomach gurgled, and above him, still cloaked in dark, Will felt Hannibal grin. He felt it in the way Hannibal's stomach muscles tightened against his own in the half exhalation of a smirk.

" _Impatient_." Hannibal breathed, more than a drop of wry affection in the tone.

Magnetically, Will's own face bent to the same smirk, before a wave of nausea swept it away again. He thought of the dead man's face as the life had slipped out of him, and how that expression had been both disgusting and thrilling. Will thought of the hot gush of blood rushing up past his knuckles in twin red roses. He thought of sinking his thumbs hard into those deep-set eye sockets, into the hollow of his throat, into the soft flesh of his belly. How beautiful it had been, and terrible. A cold sweat broke out over Will's forehead as he struggled temporarily to regain a bit of personal space. Fortunately, Hannibal wasn't as strong as he was smart, and Will fairly easily reclaimed a few inches of breathing room, though oddly, from his position against the wall, Hannibal's shadow seemed to stretch out and follow Will as he leaned away. Graham swept a forearm across his sweaty forehead, and kept close to the corner and the cover that masked them there, Hannibal's body still warm at his shoulder.

The _choripan_ vendor had died a magnificent and grisly death by Will Graham's hands. It had happened. It couldn't un-happen, despite a notebook filled with math equations Will knew that Hannibal kept close at hand for those woozy, rainy nights when he would sit quietly alone, with only the scratching sound of pencil on paper to keep him company. But then, Will didn't need to wonder if Hannibal had wanted this particular kill to stay dead. It was an emphatic affirmative, even in the silence. Will's sticky fingers twitched beneath Hannibal's hand. He squinted in the dark at them, shaking. Hadn't he sworn to himself to never again bend his hands to this elegant purpose?

Or, had he remembered something wrong somewhere? _Had he actually sworn a vow_ never to kill again? Id and ego crashed against one another in a zero sum game.

It was hard to see the picture clearly when all Will had ever really been able to do was, simply… _feel_. Everything had all gotten so lost. He frowned at Hannibal in the dark. It had all been swept away, trapped in an impossible snarl somewhere between the feeling of Hannibal's pulse inside the pit of his arm, and the sharp impact of hitting the black Atlantic. It had all happened so fast. How had it happened _so fast?_ And yet, it hadn't been fast. It had been slow. It had been already decided even before the first dawn light of the morning had touched the horizon. Will's life was plagued by dualities. He hadn't wanted to kill the choripan vendor, until the exact moment that he had. Hannibal, Abigail, Randall Tier, and so many other faces, so many other throats he had imagined and not imagined that he had constricted, punctured, sucked the juices from… That man had been no different. Without fully realizing it, Will's trembling took on a different quality. Shock threatened to settle in, harshing Will's breath like a broken race horse, and icy rivulets of sweat began to slip down his neck.

Two glittering pinpricks regarded Will from the corner, a clinical tilt to the taller silhouette. And then Hannibal's hand slid down Will's torso, pulling him closer again for apparently very little reason. Will quietly shook against him, held back from the light of the street, waiting patiently for something he couldn't guess to happen.

"Are you feeling guilty, Will?" Hannibal whispered, sounding equal parts curious and objective. "Stay in the moment, if you wouldn't mind. I would prefer not having to carry you in a catatonic state back to the hotel."

"I'm-m-m  n-n-not sure _nooow_ is an appropriate time for you to discuss your… your, _stockholm syndrome fetish_ , doctor."

The moist slide of Hannibal licking his lips. "...Tell me. How did it feel?"

There was a breathy quality to the words that dropped Will's stomach out as he heard them. His mouth went dry, lips parting slightly after a long pause when his body reinstated regular oxygen intake. Everything went silent, fading down to a dull and distant thrum, like water far away through a thicket of trees. Even the howling dog seemed to sense something in the air, and quieted until Will was sure Hannibal could hear his own erratically thudding pulse.

"It f-felt… like… moving… _upstream_ , with sails filled with the sound of death. Like, shouting, with no mouth. Like… falling out of my skin, and into yours."

"Yes." the whisper pushed cooly across Will's cheeks. He blinked when the word tickled his eyelashes.

If possible, Will's voice lowered a hitherto unknown octave, tremulous with a vulnerable hitch. " _I… hate this_ , Hannibal."

"Death comes, like a shoe with no foot in it. Like a suit with no man in it. It has no tongue, and yet it makes a mournful noise. But Autumn comes to pinch out the light of summertime too, and isn't the hue of a turning leaf just as beautiful as a sunset?"

And then, it was there.

Will saw it.

Behind them, it laid in wait. The empath grinned weakly as he watched the shadow on the wall behind Hannibal slide down and reach out. He should have known it would find them, now of all moments. It pooled beneath them, licking at their shoes in an insidious puddle of oil. It was _the creature_ … _the shadow_ … the one that had crept up from the depths of the ocean to try and pull them below the surface and down down down. His eyes unfocused, his limbs shaking harder as the color drained from his face.

 _"Do you see it?_ "

"What do you see?" Hannibal's voice took on a clinical tone at the odd question.

" _I see… your… shadow_."

Will blanched as the thing _touched_ him, both there and yet not there at all. Was it a hallucination? He fisted a bloody hand into the fabric of Hannibal's shirt to keep from screaming, his pupils dilating with fear. Had it followed him? All the way here? Beneath the ocean, beneath his eyelids as he slept, beneath the hull of the little water taxi, from beneath his dead exhalations on the shore of their little island, It had come. It had come for him, again. All the way to this moment. Hannibal remained totally still, suspiciously silent, though the sound of his gentle inhalation gave away a deeper interest.

The thing touched Will low to the ground at first, sliding cold tendrils up his ankles. Will was barely aware of Hannibal's mouth leaning closer in the dark, suddenly too dizzy to perceive his lips as they ghosted as moth's wings down the salty side of his neck. Was this a dream? Like the sound of howling dogs shaking the windows of his house had been? It was slipping in a slug's embrace up behind the hollows of his knees now, then stopping Will's breath as it slid up the backs of his thighs.

" _Listen to me, Will._ " Hannibal's voice was muffled, too far away to heed. _"Listen to the sound of my voice. You're going into shock."_

A cold shudder ran up Will's back as the shadow slid up his spine. Or were those fingers he felt now? What oily grip slid around his throat to cradle the nape of his neck, constricting with a mother's love? His knuckles shaking, Will rode his adrenaline high out by sucking his bottom lip up between his teeth. He bit down hard, sucking in a groan, fingers clawing fistfuls of Hannibal's shirt. The steady rhythm of Hannibal breathing in his scent filled his universe, until, very abruptly, angry voices finally shouted out in an alarmed jumble from just beyond the alley.

In a blink, the shadow was gone. Hannibal's arm tightened marginally around Will's waist as in the distance a woman screamed, and then began to uncontrollably wail.

"…The way is clear." Hannibal murmured in his ear, closer still than Will remembered.

Graham stumbled back a step from Hannibal's body, blanching paler still in the wet alley. He looked behind him, to the narrow and now empty path that would loop them back around the stall and into the rush of the night market crowd where they would be lost. A realization settled in, painting Will a sweaty, incredulous blue in the night air as the sobbing woman's voice filled every crevice around them. The dog was barking again. Will gulped in deep healing breaths, the howling louder now, seemingly all the more miserable for having sat in silence.

"…Did we wait here just so… you could… _hear_ _somebody_ find the body?" Will whispered, disgusted.

Hannibal's expression was unreadable in the dark. "A reason among others."

 

When Hannibal reached out and took his hand again, Will didn't fight.

 

 

—------------------------

 

 

The bustle of the night market slid past Will Graham's eyes like shards of glass, nothing but a blur of pain and color slicing the raw exterior of his senses. Hannibal's hand was his only constant, firm and cool and dry as it pulled the lost bouy of Will's mind along a new and meandering path. Will watched with distant interest as he plunged Will's hands into a rain barrel, sloughing away the blood and bits of bodily debris. Later, he watched Hannibal, with his coat buttoned fast across the blood stain on his chest, haggle quietly with a man at a store front full of fine linens. Will watched himself stood on a platform as a new shirt and suit jacket were modified to his form. The tailor joked in a warm spanish, the burr of a lifetime of cigarette smoking making his voice genial as a grandfather's. Will's spanish from his academy days only helped a little when the kind man rumbled " _Usted es un hombre afortunado!_ " Will had smiled without humor, and only said " _No… si._ "

Hannibal assured they were both immaculately suited in the simple matter of a few hours. Nobody followed them. No shadow crept at their heels under the bright lights of the central drag. Glittering like princes from a country no one had ever heard of, it wasn't long before Hannibal was pushing Will through another door, and smiling as he greeted several white-aproned men who tended a broad and open charcoal fire. Blue glazed brick ran the length of the grill up to the hip, and Will felt his heart rate pick up when Hannibal pressed him down into a seat at the bar then passed over the packet tied with a string that they had taken from their friend the choripan vendor, only with a polite explanation of " _lomo de cerdo_!"

" _Ah, si, pork! Pork, inmediatamente!_ "

When they brought the dish to them, the meat had been cubed and skewered, then rearranged in an artful semicircle around a rich burgundy sauce that smelled of plums and star anise, bright sprigs of basil and snappy rings of diced chiles sprinkled cheerfully on top. Hannibal poured Will a tall glass of a cold Alsatian Riesling and watched him for a moment, before picking up his fork and beginning their meal.

Will watched Hannibal eat for long minutes in silence, before at last picking up his own fork and finally joining in.

 

 

—--------------------------------

 

 

"…You knew I would kill him."

"I anticipated."

Will paced restlessly back and forth past a tidy stack of pressed and bagged suits he hadn't ordered, lost in the angry machinations of his own thoughts.

"And what, _exactly_ , did you think I would do afterward?"

Hannibal took the opportunity to recline back into a red armchair that sat plush in a corner of their hotel room, next to an elaborate standing nickel plated mirror. He ran a strong hand across his mouth once as his eyes went distant, bent on some faraway thought. When he came to a conclusion, he elegantly crossed his legs and settled his fingers in a lattice across his highest thigh.

"You're trapped between two worlds, Will. _'Why will you not wait for me, when I am trying to hold you, so that even in Hades with our arms embracing we can both take the satisfaction of dismal mourning?'_ This is how you feel. You have been asking me to wait." A flicker of annoyance came and went. "Patiently, I should think. Like before? Alana saw to it that my time passed… unfettered. _Abyssus abyssum invocat_. But standing still isn't waiting. Are you alive, Will? Or are you dead?"

"Overlooking how rude it is to assume I'm Persephone in this scenario, I-"

"-you don't think I kidnapped you?"

"OVERLOOKING how _rude_ it is to assume I'm Persephone, which… granted, I, actually…. _might… be…._ " Will divulged agitatedly, pinching the bridge of his nose for half a second as if to squeeze the very thought out of his brain. "What I can't seem to _reckon_ here is your overlying assumption that I should want to take any more responsibility for the victims of your past than I already have. You _knew_ I would react! …the _stench_ , he kicked those poor dogs… "

"Oh, _many_ times, yes, hm. Yes."

"… raw from the rope…"

"Yes, his advantageous choice of blended meats certainly would not have recommended you to his person should you have decided to sample his wares in real time. Even _mariposa_ style, a butterfly cut of meat doesn't change the fact that dog is dog. Charming man."

Will looked haunted, his now clean fingers clenching with recollection. "It's not _my_ responsibility, Hannibal. I don't… _care_ …. how rude he was to you _twenty years ago_. This has _nothing_ to do with the animals, or, _whatever it was I saw_ in that alley… You did that. I shouldn't _have to_ be one of the two birds you hit with one stone. You were just _curious to see what I would do._ But you didn't _have to be_ curious, did you? Because you already _knew_ what I would do. My hands aren't just _at your privilege_. Are you trying to prove to me that I'm still alive?"

Unperturbed, Lecter calmly tilted his head as he listened, watching the other man's wild gesticulations. "-Sit down, Will, you're being quite hysterical."

"I d-don't- _hysterical_? …When have you _ever_ used that word seriously at any point throughout your entire professional career? I knew you were old fashioned but I didn't think you were _archaic_. Unless-"

Hannibal's eyes flicked down as a smirk pulled minutely at his mouth.

"…Are you… Are you _teasing_ me, Doctor Lecter?"

"When one has experienced a productive day I see no reason not to ride the pleasurable sensation of accomplishment throughout the rest of the evening. Hard work should be rewarded, Will. I would very much like to indulge you somehow. Is there something you would like in exchange?"

Will's face froze, along with the rest of him, smack in the middle of the persian rug. He considered the sentiment, suspicion lacing the look as he let his eyes wander over the sitting psychiatrist. Hannibal painted a perfect picture from his lounge, chiaroscuro in the warm gold light of the dark room, a purring lion with all of it's beauty and all of it's unpredictability.

"…You… _didn't… let me_ … " Graham haltingly began. He sounded strangely unsure all of a sudden, like a requesting little boy afraid of his father's reply. For another long moment, he looked as if he might dismiss the entire sentence, every hair on his arms bristling at attention.

"..I… h-had _wanted_ to… go back, for… the.. _the last dog_."

At first Hannibal's face was completely blank. The silence dragged on long enough that Will retracted a little bit, afraid in that moment of his own words. He feared, perhaps even now, of the way he had exposed to Hannibal the little boy that young Will Graham he had once been, barefoot in the boat yard and chasing strays. A life that the extremely wealthy Lecter family would have never allowed for their own son. Will broke the stare first, skirting down to look at the rug, and to run a frustrated hand through his fringe.

"…Let us strike a bargain, then."

The reply came suddenly, pulling Will's eyes abruptly back up. Here, at long last, returning with an unsettling flawlessness, was the affable tone of Hannibal Lecter's professional mask. Dr. Lecter smiled genially, reassuring the other man even as the look gave Will a distinct shudder of something unfathomable. Far away, somewhere still drowning beneath the black waves of the Atlantic ocean, Will Graham's old heart and mind whispered a dread warning. Again, the shadow of that night crept closer.

Rapid blinking cleared the vision and Will canted his head stiffly to the side. "…What did you have in mind?"

"I would like to share an experience. Something that in the dark garden of your mind would cause many flowers to bloom." The doctor gazed lovingly at Will's puzzled face. "Something I shared with Abigail. And now, if you would allow, I would like to share it with you."

"A trade."

"Yes, a trade."

"Something you want in exchange for something I want."

"Do I have your compliance?"

Though danger lingered in the agreement, something still buried irrevocably within Will thrummed with love at the mention of Abigail's name. He let the impulse stay his denial, thinking of Abigail's smiling face. How many secrets had she and Hannibal shared as they gravitated privately around one another in secret, hidden in Hannibal's stately mansion? How many whispered conversations, how many lessons learned had Will been excluded from? Even after everything that had happened, she pulsed between them, a fount of affection and lost opportunity. Will frowned as her memory cut into him, not sure if he felt more hurt or curious. Finally, after a long silence, he gave a curt nod.

Hannibal let that sink in, then gave a slow smile. "Excellent. I'll put in a request with the kitchen and have them send up a tea set."

Will sunk tiredly into a tall backed wooden chair by the door that he had thrown his coat haphazardly across earlier. "What, right now?"

 

Hannibal's smile darkened, even as he reached up to undo the collar of his newly purchased linen button-down.

"Yes, Will. Right now."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mariposa is the butterfly cut used on chorizo for choripan, slicing the sausage lengthwise so it can be put on a bun with chimichurri, a green sauce. 
> 
> Hello yes its me again, and this chapter might be a little odd. Writing Hannibal fanfiction in general has proved to be an enormously huge challenge in so, so many ways. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure everything fit in the right places, and that the pacing was correct, the tone was right, and that the details were all accurate and well researched, and I just ended up feeling like I was writing something really stiff and academic, with too much thinking and not enough ACTION! Writing dialogue for these guys is fun, so I wanted to put more emphasis on that. In general, I think as I go along with this story, I'll only be writing the parts that interest me. The murder of the choripan vendor, who for sure was a rude motherfucker to hannibal long ago in the days of his youth, seemed inconsequential. Hannibal doesnt really care about this choripan guy, (or, omg, shudder, STREET FOOD?!?!?!) he just wants to give Will something to do. You don't need to see his death because he is a useless slug who is meant to be a terrible person that Will Graham would find easy to kill. I wrote a draft where Will watches him kick dogs and ended up laughing at myself for how terrible it was. His function serves as a catalyst for Will's change. Will has gotta KICK START his life again, and Hannibal is getting chafed waiting around to be the murder husbands he thought for sure by now that they would already be. 
> 
> I know I said sexy times this chapter, but, I mean, basically they have to happen next chapter. I planned it that way, I swear.


	5. Soñar Té

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal and Will enter into a dangerous conversation with the aid of a psychedelic tea. Rated Adult for the introduction of explicit sexual content. Potentially interpreted dubcon

  
  
  
“So, what’s this witchy potion all about? People tea? A _truth serum_?”  
  
  
When Hannibal had called for it, the hotel staff promptly ran up a tea cart arranged with several small white china cups, and two elegantly minimalist teapots. Laid out in a diagonal swathe between the china, a collection of fresh-cut flowers traced a subtle S. When the attendant had gone and Hannibal had disappeared into the closet to fetch his steeping kit, Will strode over to let his fingers glaze across the soft petals. He examined them each in silence, purple Japanese Anemones, white Aster, and a exuberant flush of Bouvardia, all a soft pink, rimmed in the center with a droplet of blood red.  
  
“Or..?  Is it just some fancy imported strand of magic mushroom?” Will’s continued questions burbled, thick with more accusation than amusement, but not quite void of it either. “Something you found too delectable to pass up stuffing in your pockets, and then by proxy stuffing down _my gullet_?”  
  
“Close.”  Hannibal emerged from the closet with a subtle, indulgent smile. In his hand he held a soft leather pouch. “The tea is made of powdered psilocybin, and a somewhat more flavorful and sensorially palatable cocktail of my own invention. Through the use of ammonia, the compound negates some of the less savory side effects common with psychedelic hallucinogens. I merely padded it.”  
  
“This is… _seriously_ a magic mushroom tea?” Will drained of color, a fine sweat making the skin of his face clammy. He plucked a cup up off the cart and regarded it’s inside as if it was already full of scorpions. A beat afterward, a secondary revelation trumped the horror of the first and he set the cup back down with a loud clack.  
  
 “You gave Abigail the same drug that _burnout Phish heads_ shovel down on _pizza_ with _peanut butter_?”  
  
The look Hannibal replied with was acerbic. But only the briefest cluck of disdain followed to inform Will how demeaning his words truly were. Will challenged Hannibal with another incredulous lift of his eyebrows, before the standoff ended in a stalemate and they both sat back down again. Will had drawn a narrow wooden chair up to the cart, which Hannibal arranged close at hand to the plush armchair by the standing nickel-plated mirror that he had taken an obvious affinity to.  Quiet reigned between them as Hannibal carefully and pointedly poured the homemade compound from his leather pouch in the first teapot, then lifted the second, full of steaming  water, and poured it in a deliberate circle into the belly of the first.      
  
“Don’t worry, it is quite mild. It’s purpose is to relax you, body and mind.” Dr. Lecter’s voice was soothing in the muted gold light of the bedroom, and Will felt the muscles in his shoulders subtly relax. “I wish to ask you a series of questions. Quite like what I did with Abigail. And please, be as honest as you find that you can be. I don’t think our current contract of friendship could withstand any outright lies. Regardless, I hope you should know that by now I will know if you are lying to me.”  
  
Hannibal lifted the second teapot and tipped it, all the elegance and propriety of tea ceremonies of his distant past informing the angle of his wrist, and soon Will’s own small china cup was filled with a surprisingly aromatic golden liquid. When Hannibal then replaced the pot without pouring a cup for himself, Will waited a beat, before taking up the offering. It steamed pleasantly as Will pulled his eyes down into it’s amber depths.  
He was silent as he contemplated the absent Abigail, before nodding once, and taking a slow, small sip. His eyes were still in the middle distance when Hannibal launched into his first question.  
  
  
“Tell me, Will. How did it feel?”  
  
“Clinical.”  
  
“How did killing feel, or my question?”  
  
  
“How did _which_ murder feel?” A huff of latent frustration rippled up Will’s spine, pulling his posture straight again.  “And I hardly think you qualify as my psychiatrist anymore, doctor, so you can drop the professional tone if you don’t mind. Your questions are old hat.”  
  
Lecter stared across their distance, a certain serene blankness to his face.  And yet, something rippled beneath his eyes, like a distant whispered pleading. Was this a look of entreaty, or something closer to the natural gaze of the tiger as it observes it’s prey from a long distance away? Admittedly, it had often been difficult in the past to tell whether Hannibal’s emotions were sincere or performative. Now, after the fall, he eluded to wishing to maintain more transparency. But if nothing would ever change between them, it was that Hannibal would never stop playing games. Will contemplated the other man’s eyes, mere pinpricks of light emanating from within shadowed, skullish recesses. He rounded his thought off with the concept that at the moment, it hardly mattered what Hannibal’s motivation was. It all lead to the same end.  
  
  
Hannibal’s voice held a note of compassion as he gestured for Will to continue drinking.  
  
“…Please.”  
  
“I don’t want to answer that question right now.” Will muttered, before taking a somewhat more enthusiastic gulp from his cup. Across their distance, Hannibal’s eyes narrowed marginally with a sinister twinkle.  
  
“I don’t wish for you to be forced to volunteer anything you don’t honestly wish to share. You must come to this in a spirit of complete contrition.”  
  
Will hissed a dry grin in through suddenly clenched teeth, and he anxiously folded one knee over the other. “Contrition suggests regret.”  
  
“Do you have any regrets, Will?”  
  
The chuckle was involuntary. “Hmm… several? I mean, don’t _you_ regret anything? Then again, maybe you don’t.  But, _I’m_ sick. Sick with all the _woulda, coulda, shoulda’s._ ”    
  
“Did you know you would take us off the cliff before you did it? Or did you knead your decision out of the feelings of the moment?”  
  
  
The question halted the entire conversation. Will’s jaw hung marginally wider as he let his reaction roll over him. He felt troubled, something riling and sick rooting around in the pit of Will’s stomach. He sat forward in his chair, letting his cup dangle from precariously loose fingers as he stared. For long moments, Will blinked through gauzy layers of thought, his thick, dark eyelashes fanning across the paleness of his cheeks. He seemed to tremble then, terrified of himself and the moment brought to the forefront. Eventually, he shook his head and sat up again, looking away. A drop of sweat slid fat down his temple and filled Hannibal’s nostrils with the scent of fear. Will was silent, apprehensive apology pouring thick from his distracted gaze.  
  
 Hannibal sighed quietly, barely any air unsettled. A minuscule little exhalation.  
  
“I forgive you, Will. In perfect honesty, I am, in another form, quite proud of you. I never once believed I had chosen poorly. There are depths of devotion buried deep inside you. So deep, I think, that I would never wish to see their bottom. Sometimes I think that, surely, it must go on forever. The trick of course being, inspiring that devotion in you.”  
  
“You sure inspired _something_.” Graham laughed with a nasty curl of his lip.  
  
“And so you took my hand and told me it was beautiful.”  
  
  
  
Though they had previously shared much time in silence, nothing rung louder than the sound of the truth. Will stared directly into Hannibal’s eyes, vaguely aware of his body temperature beginning to rise. Behind Hannibal’s armchair, a tall standing lamp shone soft gold light across the surface of the nearby nickel plated mirror. Red and gold and grey slowly began to gently pulse, folding together like fingers.  
  
Every question gone unanswered, every truth Will had adamantly hid himself from, Every black inclination now flittered slowly up through translucent layers of undulating memory, until the very taste of his questions bit Will’s tongue with a copper burn. He stared back at the Lithuanian, who apparently felt completely comfortable letting his words hang in the meaningful silence.  
  
  
Will set down his teacup with a definitive clack and threaded his fingers in his lap. He took in a wavering breath. “Are you in love with me?”     
   
Hannibal blinked once, his timber revealing nothing.  “Yes.”  
  
“Romantically speaking?”  
  
“A banal descriptor, but yes.”  
  
“Did you know that I knew you were in love with me?”  
  
“Of course.”    
  
“When did you know?”  
  
“When you came to my office for the first time with your hair combed back.” Something warm an loving flickered behind Hannibal’s eyes then, like an inviting candle in the lonely black of an empty window. “But you just couldn’t change that awful aftershave too, could you? The concept of letting me think I had won the whole pot was simply still too horrendous a concept. Wasn’t it? You thought that just one boon should be enough for me. You spoke to me so directly. Clever boy. I might have believed, if you had actually done away with that lotion with the horrible ship on the bottle. I’m quite aware you know I despise it.”  
  
Growing soft, Will’s eyes flicked down to the floor again, his body perfectly still and quiet as he watched the shadows begin to shift and dance. His body hummed in time with them.  
  
“But would you like to know a secret?” Hannibal continued, his voice lowering to barely a whisper. The very air of the room seemed to vent away.  “One boon was still quite sufficient.”    
  
  
The true declaration of something gone unspoken for so long physically shook Will. He felt naked and vulnerable, like a figure with no filling. Like an imminently breakable vessel shedding useless drops of sweat. His hands trembled, even as he laced them more firmly together. The patterns on the oriental rug beneath their feet shook themselves awake, then began to sway around one another in a distant, lively promenade.  
  
“Did you ever believe I lov-… that I… was…. that I was in love with you? As well?”  
  
Now it was Hannibal’s turn to sit in silence, and his adam’s apple bobbed gently as he swallowed once in his self-imposed pause. Finally, after another lingering beat, “…Yes, in a way. But I believe you can recall the result of that mistake.”  
  
The memory did indeed spark a recall. It was a physical sensation more than an emotion, and Will’s hand clutched at his torso in a spike of momentary fear. Finding himself untorn, His arm muscles relaxed marginally, but his fingers lingered, knotting at his jacket above the old wound.  The sensation was intense enough for the curly-haired man to take physical stock of himself, and of the psychoactives now aggressively throbbing through his veins. Will’s pulse sped up as his scar twinged and his pupils blew wide. He sat back with a sweaty grunt, and all the colors in the room rushed together. They sweltered.    
  
“ _Jesus_. You call this tea mild?”  
  
“Comparatively, yes.”  
  
“Oh, _comparatively_. Great. Compared to _what_? A _vision quest?_ ”  
  
“That’s quite enough. I believe I am the one asking the questions.” Hannibal chided, before folding one long leg over the other from his stately chair. “Were you happy with your wife?”  
  
“With my… _my_ _wife_?” Will rebutted, sweat gathering along his hairline as he struggled to catch up to his suddenly intensifying high. A wrist thoughtlessly swept across his forehead before settling shakily back against his knee.  
  
“Don’t you… how could you just…?  Don’t speak to me about my wife. Not now. _Not ever_. I don’t want to discuss her with you.”  
  
“You were unhappy, then.”  
  
“Yes. I mean- _No_! I just, it’s not… It’s more complicated than that. _You know that._ Why are you asking about Molly?”  
  
“Do you miss her?”  
  
Frustration and resentment swelled, overwhelming. The feeling rolled in like a full, heady wave, and just as quickly receded again, leaving Will gasping, his collar moist with perspiration.  When Hannibal decided to pursue an issue, Will knew, he couldn’t be dissuaded again. It was pointless to argue with a man who had never lost an argument in his life. Not without being outright insulted, or had an attempt on his life executed. Will inhaled a very, very deep and steadying breath. The world tilted sideways, light and shadow burning hot and cold, before everything evened out and Will could think again.  
  
Which is exactly what he did. He thought seriously on the question.  
  
  
“I miss…” he eventually mused, slightly calmer but only still half collected.  “… _parts_ of her.”      
   
In the shadows, Hannibal’s lips imperceptibly twitched. “You are a physical creature. You shouldn’t feel ashamed by the demands of your body. Or your heart.”  
  
“-No,” Will corrected with a jabbing finger, his now sweat-soaked bangs falling haplessly into his eyes. “I _never_ said I was ashamed.”  
  
“Then, tell me. What do you miss?”  
  
“Isn’t it _ironic_ that the serial murderer who just confessed he was in love with me is asking me what I love about my _wife_? my _wife_ that was almost _serial murdered?_ ”  
  
“That was not the question. The question was what do you miss.”     
  
  
First came a sharp bark of laughter from Will. Then came a brief, fleeting trill of terror. He settled finally on gnawing thoughtfully on his bottom lip, until the flesh grew red from abuse. Hannibal waited patiently for his answer, only the angled cant of his head revealing his intense interest.  
  
“I… I miss…”  Will groped after the words, his face flushing in frustration. But after his mouth opened and closed on a few futile sentences, he eventually gave an annoyed sigh and shook it all off with a shrug. Quiet like a lion waits beneath the tree for the return of the pride, Hannibal calmly sat with an expectant look.  
  
“I miss the…. creature comforts, I guess… Her… laugh. A warm body next to me in the dark. Someone that isn’t a corpse. Or someone that isn’t sent to kill me.  Her smell. Her…” Will’s flush took on a different quality as he looked at the ground, his voice lowering an octave. “Her _taste_.”  
   
That merited a quiet huff from Hannibal, though he didn’t follow up with an explanation. Will didn’t need an explanation when all he had to do was look at Hannibal’s smug expression and know they were more alike than they were different, in too many disconcerting ways.  
  
“Sensory perception is indeed a great source of comfort. We long for what is familiar. It makes us feel safe, cradled by the repetitious signals our bodies send us telling us to relax.”  
  
“I don’t think I’ve ever been actually relaxed in my life. Meeting you didn’t help.”  
  
“No. But perhaps it is still possible for me to try to relax you.”    
  
Will’s flush in the dimly lit gold of the room made him look savaged, and the acidic hint of distress he was beginning to release into the air around him pushed Hannibal to tightly grip the armrests of his chair. He watched Will kick the statement around in his contorted mind, both vulnerable and confused, not at all unlike when they had first met years ago, when the fever of encephalitis had rendered him fierce and unpredictable like a cornered animal. Half pieced together, Will finally quirked his head at a matching angle to the doctor’s, and met his eye.  
  
“What are you implying?”  
  
“I want to help you, Will. I simply wish for you to be the best version of yourself.”  
  
Graham huffed dismissively. “You mean like _you_.”  
  
“I mean like you. It is not implied that you being like you or me being like me are mutually exclusive things.”  
  
From his seat, Will quietly glanced across their distance, soft and uncertain.  He blinked as he chewed over the sentiment, his pupil-blown gaze glittering wetly in the shadows.  
  
  
“I… miss… how… _hot_ … she was.” The volunteered words were barely a whisper, the throb of sensation and color boxing Will in. “Slick heat. A backwards birth. I miss feeling… _safe_ , there. For twenty minutes I could just be… _a normal husband_.”  
  
“You mistake was longing for normalcy when it is intrinsically your polar enemy. You seek the security of assurance. But it all stems from your lack of comfort with your true self.  
 In this case, you’re speaking of physical assurance. But couldn’t that be satisfied by simply gathering your dogs to you and letting them sleep pressed to your knee?”  
  
Will laughed, a genuine, rich noise, before the sound faltered out into insecurity again. “No! No, it’s, uh… it’s different.”  
  
There was a pause as they both quietly considered things. Will coughed, suddenly embarrassed as another untoward question burbled to the surface. “Do you..? Can you even… I mean, does it even bring you pleasure? Do you enjoy it? Or do you just do it to fuck with people?”  
  
Hannibal’s admonishing look first chastised Will for his crass language, then offered a followup scolding for the question itself. Meekly, Will looked down at his hands, then back up again.  
  
“Sometimes I think you believe me to be truly inhuman, Will. Let me assure you the opposite is the case. Like any man, I have my likes and dislikes. Making love is something I take very seriously. I have never taken a lover only for the sake of sex, or in turn, only for the sake of gain. I like to believe I offer each of my partners the respect and attention their individual personalities merit.”  
  
“Like Alanna.” Graham prompted, with a bit more disappointed gravel than he had originally intended. He looked away.  
  
“Like Alanna.” Hannibal agreed.    
  
Another contemplative silence.  
  
  
Then,  “…Would you like me to tell you about it?”  
  
  
Will’s head jerked up abruptly, his too-wide eyes rising to level with Hannibal, who sat like nothing but a cold, sentient shadow in the soft pour of his chair.  
  
“You mean, about your… you and…. with Alanna while you-?”  
  
“Yes, exactly that. Would you like me to? You’re curious.”  It was a statement, not a question.  
  
  
Like crossing the wrong wires, Will’s system temporarily overloaded. Before he even registered his own movement he had launched himself to his feet. As he swept past Hannibal, the same sweet scent proceeded him that Lecter had caught a whiff of as he slid his thumb across Will’s scar in the palatial bathroom of their island getaway.  
  
“Tell me you aren’t curious.” Lecter spoke, following after the pacing man with a steady gaze, half a wicked smile pulling at his thin lips. The look lingered only briefly, before it disappeared again unseen by anyone or anything other than the markedly absent God.    
  
Already haggard, Will walked in feckless tracks back and forth across the rug. One hand went to wrack through his sweat-damp curls, while the other slid across his abdomen, unconsciously feeling for the raised scar tissue hidden beneath in a kind of half-baked self assurance. He didn’t stop pacing until he froze with a sudden ragged jerk. When he looked down to the source of interference, he only discovered Hannibal’s fingers clamped around his forearm. He stared at those fingers for too long, drugs mingling confusingly with his other senses until all he could think of was how lovely that hand was. How strong. How dynamic.    
  
He nodded once, and Hannibal’s hand slid away from him again, leaving only the ghost memory of warmth.  
  
The room throbbed for Will. Warm, dark gold poured around him, spilling shadows up the sides of the hotel wall. The bed stood menacingly large in the corner, the thick navy blue canopy looking like velvet in the dark, though Will knew it’s make from touching it earlier, something closer to a thick weave of silk and cotton. His body tingled, and a fine sweat had sprung up everywhere to give him an all-over flush. Antlers slid in sinister flat black shapes across the carpet.  
  
“Take off your jacket, Will. You’re overheating.”  
  
“I’ll, uh… I’ll leave it on, thanks.”  
  
“As you wish. What would you like to know?”  
  
  
Will looked abruptly to his shoes, too hassled at the moment to speak. His face flickered equal parts irritation and nervousness. The last time he had taken mushrooms had been college, and he sure as hell remembered feeling sick as a dog from eating them for long hours afterward. Why didn’t he feel sick now? He floated somewhere much more pleasant, like the pharmacological concoction rushing in his body and his brain had been made for a much more sinister and stimulating purpose. His whole body had begun to subtly vibrate, a pleasant tingle ringing his flesh up and down from curls to toes. It was excruciating in it’s pulsing ticklishness, and Will tracked Hannibal out of the corner of his eye as the therapist stalked in a slow circle around him.  
  
  
“Heat is an interesting thing.” Hannibal remarked offhandedly, nothing but a murmur in the dark. “When you hold fire to something you wish to ignite, it loosens the surrounding molecules to allow for chemical penetration. Don’t you think it’s the same with people, Will?”  
  
The sound of Hannibal’s tongue wrapping around the syllable of his name, pointedly, carefully, sent a ripple of goosebumps down Will’s back. He shook his head mutely.  
  
“Sometimes what is wanted, and even what is needed is the efficacious application of a considered exterior force. Alana is a particularly bright woman, as you know. Both charming and intelligent. She required quite a bit of exterior stimulation before allowing for her own penetration.”  
  
Hannibal slid quietly behind Will’s stiff shoulders, until he stood inhaling the molasses-thick, sticky-sweet scents of fractured nerves and dubious enjoyment. The empath was now uncontrollably exuded them both, incapable of escaping the moment.    
  
“Interestingly enough, it was you who was the final stimulus needed to push her into my bed. I suppose I should thank you, though in another way you most likely would resent me for it. But it was her belief in our mutual mourning that convinced her to become mine.”    
  
When Hannibal whispered the next words, they were a hot gust on Will’s ears. “She moans quite animatedly. Do you remember the shape of her mouth? The feel of her tongue?”  
  
  
With a painful hitch, Will’s eyes squeezed shut. Below his immaculately hand-tailored pleats, the silhouette of an erection began to tent.    
  
“ _Stop_ it,” Will hissed, worry lacing his voice. “I changed my mind, _I- I- I don’t want to hear about this anymore_.”    
  
“Would it bring you pleasure to know your name slipped past her lips on more than one occasion?” Hannibal continued on, unencumbered. “On the nights when her hopes seemed like nothing more than ruined vessels, she thought of you as I held her in my arms. As I slid in deep, past the place where her worries lived, she found you there.”  Hannibal’s voice grew possessive, and just slightly rough. “Just as I found you there. Did you… ever see me, sometimes, Will? Even for… just a moment?”  
  
Will’s tongue was heavy in his mouth, thick and dry as cotton. He was more surprised than anyone when he felt his voice crack in his throat as he nodded, feverish. “ _hhhh…Yes._ ”  
  
The man behind him was a hot shadow, an extension of claws and antlers that blended into Will’s own figure, casting a torturous cage of black horns out across the opposing wall.     
  
“Tell me.”       
  
“The, uh… “ Graham licked his lips, desperately attempting to rehydrate. “The night with Margot. I thought of Alanna. With…. I thought of her with you.” His face flooded with rich, dark blood, striking him lightheaded. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”  
  
“And are you thinking about it now?”  
  
“ _Hmmm._ ” Will swallowed again, his palms just as clammy as his forehead. “ _Mmm-hmm._ ”     
  
“What do you see?”  
  
“Dark… _Everything_ … Bodies…. sheets twisting… into… ghostly knots… _hmmm, I can’t see_.” Will shuddered, droplets of sweat shaking from the tips of his bangs. He gasped when fingers at his elbow gave him the tiniest nudge, sliding his hand towards the tent in his pleats.    
  
“What drug is this again?” Will mumbled, while pressing shamelessly down on his erection with the hot, hard flat of his palm.    
  
 “I told you, some things of my own concoction.”  
  
“…Ah.  As, uh… as in, _m-mu-multiple things._ ”  
  
“Yes. Are you feeling euphoric yet?”  
  
“Euphoric?” Will laughed in a jerky, barking tone, barely circumnavigating panic. “Uh, _no_.”  
  
“I would touch you if I thought the gesture would be invited. But you killed a man tonight, and I can’t be sure your blood isn’t up. The only logical conclusion is you do it yourself.”  
  
“You’re _really_ invested in penetrating _all_ my barriers, aren’t you, Doctor Lecter?”  
  
Something sad came into Hannibal’s eyes, then. It was a look Will couldn’t see, but he heard it in Hannibal’s voice, hushed and subdued, a moment later.  
  
“There can be no more secrets between us now. I don’t wish to consider, or even comprehend the agony of losing you a second time. Please believe that I am yours now, Will. As much as you are mine. Perhaps moreso, if you would only cast aside these trappings of self-hatred.”  
  
“N-no, it’s you. _It’s you._ ” Will’s voice, though shaking, held a blind accusation. “ _You’re_ the one who did this to me. I don’t hate myself. I hate _you_.”  
  
When Hannibal’s fingers slid, dry and cool, up the side of his jaw, Will allowed that marble touch to turn his head. Hannibal was close, now. As close as the night on the cliff, his breath this time fresh with basil instead of coppery blood. When he spoke, however, even through the throb of sensation, his voice was still notably sad. It came as a cool gust across Will’s overheated cheeks, and his eyelashes fluttered closed at the doctor’s words.  
  
“…Is that what you still truly believe?”  
  
Was it? In the grand scheme of the evening, to Will Graham the answer to that question was rapidly receding in importance. What mattered more, was the throb below his belt, and how carefully Hannibal’s fingers moved on his jaw. Will sighed through the haze that engulfed him, feeling more acutely than ever the gentle power behind the touch to his face. These were the hands of a murderer, capable of lush swathes of brutal violence, just as as beautiful as the brush strokes of a great painting. When the silence stretched, those same fingers slid gently beneath Will’s chin, dragging knuckles sweeping in a worshipful circle until they came to graze along the pucker of scar tissue along Will’s far cheek. Hannibal carefully touched the mark, first with a light tap, and then the soft sweep of the pads of his fingers. Will allowed it, even leaning into the touch, as that same grazing sensation dragged up his temple and Hannibal swept his thumb across the scar on his forehead. Hannibal then took a moment to push the wild bramble of Will’s fringe back from his face, and the touch was strikingly intimate, as if they had already become lovers. It was a gesture performed only by someone already deeply familiar, and only after long years together of sharing a great and tender affection.  
  
“…I can help you, Will.” Hannibal rumbled, a steadily warming shadow at Will’s side, and he tucked a stray curl behind the man’s ear.  “If you ask me to.”  
  
Without meaning to, without volunteering the motion, Will leaned forward. Hannibal’s fingers pressed more firmly along his jaw as their mouths came close together, breath mingling as the intoxicating jumble of drugs and Hannibal’s touch made Will’s thoughts malleable as clay. But when a sudden, dark memory jolted to the forefront, Will abruptly jerked back just before the moment of contact. Hannibal stepped away gracefully, unperturbed in his gentlemanliness.    
  
“Help me. Help me?” Graham’s voice was wounded. Nervous adrenaline made him pace in a tight, frustrated circle. It wasn’t so much the memories that terrified him as it was his momentary loss of control. He didn’t want to dwell on how close he had just come to Hannibal Lecter’s teeth, and everything that they implied.  
  
 “Like you helped me into Chilton’s grasp so he could shuffle clumsily through my brain like some idiot amateur intern? Like you helped Abigail’s _ear_ down my _fucking throat_?”  
   
 Behind him, Hannibal sighed minutely in subtly fraying patience at Will’s words. “Unfortunate that the direction of the tide had to flow in such a way, but I have complete faith in the fact that you understood why it had to be so. You were compromising my plans, both for you and myself. These things were merely a brief detour on a much longer journey. Are we still discussing this?”  
  
“What would you _not_ like to discuss, then? How you tried to eat my brain, or how you left me for dead after killing everyone I know?”  
  
Was it possible that a human could look so cold? But then, Hannibal had never been quite human, had he? Not in any capacity of the word that Will understood, other than his obsession with one federal investigator. Will turned to let his bleary gaze track over Lecter as he folded his arms elegantly across his chest.  
  
“You’re losing track of your conversational thread, Will. It’s not me you’re angry with.”  
  
“ _I’m not in love with you_!” Will suddenly blurted, the words stunningly furious. He turned towards Hannibal through a sea of melting colors, squaring his shoulders in preparation for a fight. “You can’t _force_ me to feel something for you that I can’t feel! No light therapy or drug cocktail is going to change that! I can’t love you, not in the way you want, _so stop trying to force me!”_  
  
In the warm shadows, Hannibal regarded Will with a curious tilt of the head, as if watching a strange jungle creature perform some new and unusual behavior. He didn’t say anything, but watched with rapt attention. The response merited a mounting anger in Will, who stomped forward on a furious foot.  
  
“ _Stop it_ , stop _looking_ at me like that! You _don’t_ get to decide what I feel! That’s not your privilege!”  
  
Still, Hannibal remained silent, though he let his arms fall to his sides as Will skirted closer. If the empath’s eyes had been able to focus more clearly, he might have seen the subtle twitch of tendons flexing in Hannibal’s hands as he slowly clenched his fists. But it was lost in a swath of color and emotion instead.  
  
 “What am I supposed to do, now? _I died. I killed us_. Is this hell? _I can’t_ love you. I can’t love anyone! How can I tell the difference between the way you feel and the way I feel? You’re pushing into me and _I can’t stop it_. You’re violating me! I keep killing for you, again and again, and it feels…it feels…”  
  
Closer still, Will drifted. He moved in anger until he stood almost chest to chest with the taller psychiatrist, and Hannibal watched him with a subtly warming expression.  
  
Will’s last words seemed to tear from his mouth, a rough whisper of half swallowed anger. “It feels… _so good_!”  
  
“Yes.” Lecter finally breathed the word, a quiet gust, as a gentle look of pride washed across his face.  
  
“I _hate_ that it feels so good. _Please_ …” Will’s head bowed as the full weight of the truth fell down on his shoulders. But any word beyond that gummed up in his mouth, and like the first time Will awoke on their little deserted island and went to seek Hannibal out, Graham wound his fist into the cloth of Hannibal’s shirt. He gripped it tightly, twisting it into a snarled swirl as he tried to bravely bear his own truth. Liquid stung his eyes but hung unshed as Will grappled with himself, barely holding together as he attempted to find an anchor against the body in front of him. Colors from the wallpaper drifted through the air, flitting around his peripheral vision as silent flashing butterflies.    
  
“I can help you.” Hannibal rumbled again, gentle, quiet. “… _If_ you ask me to.”  
  
Halting and mortified, Will gave a gruff, single nod.  
  
Hannibal’s fingers were steady as they went to carefully unbutton Will’s trousers. Like last time, an electric hot gasp of fear shot through Will’s body at the concept, except this time around he swallowed the following protest. He bore it almost nobly, and Hannibal proceeded after a careful beat by sliding down the fly and leaning in close to inhale the damp aroma of arousal rising off of Will’s moist skin. A thoughtful hand went to run his fingertips just beneath the elastic band of Will’s briefs, and he slid the cool touch around in a half arc until Hannibal could graze his thumb back up the other man’s spine. He pulled gently on the small of Will’s back, drawing him in closer.  
  
“I believe I told you that the logical conclusion of the evening would be that you do this yourself.” Hannibal murmured in Will’s ear, still pulling him close, though not enough to flush their bodies. Only when Lecter stepped forward to nudge his thigh gently into the hardness between Will’s legs did the other man finally groan. The sound cut itself out of Will’s esophagus like dead air escaping a corpse, half-swallowed and full of pain. He had momentarily lost his entire capacity to speak, and so after a grueling moment, he stuffed a hand down the front of his pants and grabbed his erection. On immediate contact, he knew with every fiber of his being that this would be a very brief overture before arriving at a harrowing finishing line.  
  
“Alana’s neck is very smooth. It is long and pale and oils from her scalp cling there with pheromones and twin daubs of a gardenia scent I purchased for her on a whim one night after attending a performance of _Rigoletto_.” Hannibal’s words were spoken so close to Will’s neck that he could feel the gentle brush of his lips from time to time as he spoke. The sound was soothing and stimulating at once, and Will’s hand picked up a rhythm beneath the cloth of his briefs as he listened, delicately pained.     
  
“She prefers a night cap, and on this particular occasion she had three, as she believed you to already be a lost cause. I imagine she had spent some time screaming in privacy earlier in the day. Her voice was rough when she came to me and let me kiss her until she forgot where you were. I believe she was thinking of you when I brought her to my bed and she went down on her soft, clean knees for me. That night, she applied herself with an exemplary enthusiasm. I thought of you as well. Perhaps it was distasteful of me to disrespect Alana in that moment in such a way. Was it?”  
  
A half-hitched laugh, somewhere between arousal and pain, forced itself past Will’s clenched teeth.  
  
“Probably so.” Hannibal agreed, nosing up along Will’s neck until he buried himself in Will’s hairline, soft curls slipping along his cheeks. “As churlish as it might be, I imagined her lips were yours. I fantasized about the day I would find your hair twirling beneath my fingers as I pushed down your throat like Alana was so hungrily inviting me to do. I wonder if she pursued Margot as determinedly as she pursued me? Does she still think of you as she curls her fingers and beckons Margot’s pleasure in a warm gush? You’ve felt her insides as well, so in that way you’ve had a little bit of Alana too.”  
  
“… _fuck_.” Will breathed the word in a singular gust, his hand squeezing harder, moving more rapidly. His body shook from the intensity of sensation, and the rawness of the moment peeled ever wider back as Hannibal once again went to lovingly smooth Will’s hair away from his face, peering past his blown pupils and into his soul with a ruthlessly naked gaze.  
  
“Is that what you would like for me to do to you?” The words hung abruptly thicker on Hannibal’s tongue, his expression becoming covetous. “Or, is that what you might prefer to do?”  
  
 When Will whimpered at those words, it seemed to strip Hannibal of his top layer of control. His face contorted briefly before he ducked his chin and bent to bite, hard, into the juncture of Will’s neck where it met his shoulder. As he felt the sensation of flesh ripping, Will was suddenly spilling hot cum over his knuckles and filling his underwear with sticky wetness.  A strangled sound cut past him and he stumbled forward as the jerking pleasure ripped through his heightened senses. Hannibal caught him roughly, still sucking hard at the bloody puncture wounds he had created, ignoring it completely when Will’s cum-smeared hand went out to erratically clutch for support on his shoulder, ruining his brand new dinner jacket.     
  
  When Will pushed back a few moments later, breathing hard enough to part his lips and leave his jaw hanging, Hannibal was grinning fiendishly. Traces of blood touched his lips, red badges of victory Will thought made him look monstrous.  
  
“Fuck,” Will breathed again, totally overwhelmed. “Fuh… I…. _fuck_.”  
  
Hannibal’s smug pride was palpable. “I’ll forgive your limited vocabulary if you can admit that it’s true I know when you’re lying to me.”  
  
The stunned look on Will’s face transformed again, reverting stubbornly back to anger, despite everything. “Fuck you.”  
  
Lecter’s grin grew, both in size and sinister intent. “Perhaps another time.”  
  
  
  
  
The evening ended with Hannibal’s tender ministrations. Will wondered distantly, as the doctor dabbed at his bite wound with a sanitized cotton swab, how much of Hannibal had actually been revealed to him that night. For all his vigorous attempts at breaking the final barrier between them, sexual contact, it was hard even for Will to believe that the careful fingers that had caressed him so lightly, the contained narrative that had been whispered in Will’s ear, eventually making him spill himself, had been anything less than tightly capped.  Even now, as he sat perched on the edge of the enormous canopied bed, freshly showered and now bandaged up as well, it was impossible to think that Hannibal’s behavior was anything less than a firmly placed mask.  
  
Patterns on the duvet still swayed beneath Will’s wandering gaze, his brain alive and working quickly. The drugs wouldn’t wear off for several more hours, but Hannibal left him a relatively generous distance of quiet to process what had just happened. They didn’t discuss the fact that Hannibal had apparently only ordered a single hotel room. That he had purposefully intuited this interaction. There was no argument when Hannibal gently folded Will into the bed they would share that night for the first time.  It didn’t even bother Will when Hannibal left the room for several hours, returning deep in the night dressed in a different suit and smelling like gunpowder and garlic and something musty that usually clung to damp bricks. When Hannibal changed into linen pajamas and climbed quietly into bed, he didn’t force additional contact, or indeed speak any words at all.  
  
They laid together in the dark, neither asleep. Until Will rolled, and pressed his forehead hard into Hannibal’s shoulder. No other contact was necessary to communicate what he wanted.  
  
After long minutes of quiet, contemplative breathing, Will finally said it. “…I love you.”  
  
There was an extraordinarily long stretch of silence from Hannibal as they both rolled the secret words around. But when Hannibal’s hand rose up to tuck an errant curl back behind Will’s ear again, he already had his answer.  
  
  
“I know.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gad dang, six months later and I finally broke the seal with sexy times on this moody little fanfiction! Sorry it took so long, guys! Should I continue with this story? I guess I can write more sexy times, though I think it took me forever because hitting just the right pitch for this show is quite a challenge! It's hard for me to imagine stuffy proud Hannibal would actually let himself get really crass and gross just right away, so I've got to realistically mold the story in a way where I think Will would actually be ready to ask for some XXX and have it be sincere and not in any way stockholm syndromey and Too Weird. I think we can all agree that beneath Hannibal's micro expressions lies a terrible flesh rending supermonster, so like, yo, how do I write him into that? I hate AU's in general but Hannibal is the only title I can really see a vampire AU working out well. it's like... all there.... already...... :| Oh my god, Will Graham, get ahold of yourself. 
> 
> title of this chapter google translates to: Dream Tea. I'm lazy :')

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this after the obvious insanity of the season 3 finale, but also because tumblr user wellntruly has a hannibal-centric aesthetic blog that I thought was just like, INCREDIBLY ON POINT?? Go look at it. All the poems and quotes in this ongoing recovery romance fic were snatched up from something she reblogged. It is also part birthday challenge for my bro SQUIDNAPPED who asked me to write the mind-fuckiest hannigram BJ I could manage. TTRRRRrust me fannibals, it is on the way. THESE THINGS TAKE TIME, OK?? I'm trying to be as canon as possible here. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Enjoy this short and creepy little story.


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